Static Sales Page With Pre-Existing Wordpress Site

Well I can't understand your question.You are telling that you have a brand new, static sales letter and it looks killer..than whats the problem..

You can create a page in WordPress and use that as the homepage. If you want it to be a HTML page (as you say you have a killer sales letter), convert that into a WordPress page template and use that as the template for the page which you will set as the homepage.

Okay, I'll try to explain again. I want to use this new sales letter page, which is static, as my homepage for my Wordpress site. However, simply creating a new page in Wordpress and changing the reading settings to make it static isn't going to cut it as it's graphically more complex than just a simple header, headline, etc.

I can't be the only person that's run into this issue, but it sure feels that way as nobody seems to be able to either understand what I'm trying to do or they don't know how to accomplish it.

I'm being very cautious, because I don't want to mess up my #1 ranking.

Maybe an example will help, although this is not the site I'm talking about.

Let's say you have a Wordpress site installed in the root directory. Now, let's take a static site like this one:

The Real Secrets of a Successful Close-Up Magician | Marketing For Magicians

The above site does not have a menu, but pretend is has a nice, custom menu as well.

Now, let's say you decide that when people go to your Wordpress site, this is what you want your homepage to look like. How can you use the above sales letter as the homepage?

Sure, using the header is easy enough, but when it comes to using the nice looking menu, and other elements separate from the theme's style settings, I wouldn't know how to do it even if I used something like Artisteer.

Does that make more sense?

Sorry xtrapunch, I guess I wrote my last post as you were writing yours.

I just googled "convert html page into wordpress page template"

I'll try to figure it out. Any tips?

Thank you for your help.

Get this free (not even optin) report and study it - you will have the exact answer to your question... It was created as a respons to endless number of questions like yours

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Thank you so much! I almost have it working, but I do have a couple of questions.

I have a flash video that I want to embed. I know for images, I had to put <?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/images/ before each one. What do I need to put before the flash files?

Also, all of my css is actually in the salespage.php file.

None of the bullets are showing up. For example, here's one section of my css

.bullets {
background-image: url(bullets1.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
padding-left: 33px;
line-height: 18pt;
background-position: 0 -3px;
list-style: none;
font-size: 18px;

Do I need to add something to that to make them show up as well?

You can see what I'm working on here:

Los Angeles Comedy-Magician Zach Waldman

Again, thank you so much, this ended up being much easier than I thought!

Zach

Hi,

I think i tried this in past for a client and it worked fine if my memory is serving right..

i.e.

You put your index.html static salesletter webpage, with its images and code
in the root directory where wordpress is installed and it will work.

As wordpress user index.php as default file, you can still have index.html,
but this may create issues in your current setup, but you may give it a try..
by putting your index.html webpage in there.and see if it does work?

-Mohsin

Thanks, but I already followed Istvan's directions and they worked awesome. I just need to get the video and the bullets to show.

Do you have an image file uploaded to the "root" directory (zachwaldman.com) named
bullets1.jpg?

Because this line below

background-image: url(bullets1.jpg);

tells the browser 'look for the bullets1.jpg image file right in the same directory where this file is that you, the browser, are rendering'

2 options:
- upload the images to the root folder (after 58 images it gets messy)
- create an images or image or img or whatever folder and upload the bullets1.jpg file there - then edit the style code line: background-image: url(FOLDERNAMEHERE/bullets1.jpg);

EDIT. For the video... the path is always relative to where your displayed file and where the video files are.

Okay, I got the bullets working, woohoo!

I'm still having trouble with understanding what you mean about the video.

I've tried including the full path and moving the files to the root and to inside of the themes folder. What am I missing?

Thank you so much for your help. If you ever want to visit The Magic Castle in Los Angeles, let me know. It's a private club and I'd be happy to make sure you're treated like a VIP.

EDIT: I've tried moving files everywhere and trying different paths, but still can't get the video to work. Once this is done, I'm done! Thanks again.

I got the video working. Thank you so much to everybody that helped, especially Istvan. The only weird thing is that sometimes when I view the page, the video is narrower than the box and other times, it fits perfectly.

Has anybody else seen this?

The page is at Los Angeles Comedy-Magician Zach Waldman

Also, my sociable buttons aren't appearing on the page for some reason, even though I selected the option for them to appear under the sociable settings.

Re: buttons...

Since there are so many "social" plugins - it is difficult to tell why the buttons wouldn't appear.

My suspicion: the plugin "hooks up" the display of the buttons to some WP template tag... and your "template file" is missing it.
The most usual such template tags are
<?php wp_footer(); ?> - just BEFORE the closing </body> tag
and
<?php wp_head(); ?> - immediately before the closing </head>

Try to add those to your "page template" created with my instructions.

Hmm, that didn't work, any other ideas?

There used to be a WP plugin on their site with this name (sociable) but seemingly, it was removed...

It was just a guess that you are using the Sociable plugin. Without seeing the plugin's code and/or requirements/FAQ - it's difficult to say.

Yeah, I used a different plugin and everything is working. Do you have any idea why sometimes my video is narrow and other times it's the proper size? It changes size randomly. Really strange! Even when it's narrow, the video itself looks fine, it just doesn't fill the box it's in completely.