Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks around, and works differently than other social media platforms. With Pinterest, you create boards and “pin” videos or photos to them. If your business hasn’t made use of Pinterest yet, here are 5 reasons why you should.

1. You Can Gain More Traffic

Pinterest is a fantastic way to drive more traffic to your website. Not only can you post images that contain a link back to your site, but you can also post links in the titles and descriptions. All of these links means the potential for more traffic.

If your site is built on the Genesis Framework, this tutorial will teach you how you can add a Pinterest “Pin It” button at the top or bottom of every blog post.

For example, let’s say you want to link to your business blog. You can post actual pictures from your blog with a link back to the specific blog post those images come from, driving traffic to that page on your blog and others. It’s a quick and simple way to market your business website or blog.

If you’re looking for design inspiration, follow StudioPress on Pinterest.

2. You Can Gain Exposure

Not only can you drive traffic to your website or blog using Pinterest, but you can also build exposure for your brand. Pin images of items your company sells to Pinterest, and you could potentially introduce new customers to your brand. Many clothing companies have already done this using Pinterest – pinning images of their entire catalog while linking back to their site.

This method is a free way to advertise to millions of potential customers every day. Plus, users can re-pin anything you post, which means if they like a product you sell, they can re-pin it to their boards and circulate your brand even farther.

3. You Can Interact with Customers

Pinterest can be a great tool for interacting with customers, and if you want your business to be as successful as possible, you definitely want to engage your customers and foster their sense of brand loyalty. In order to do this, create a public board on Pinterest that will enable your customers to provide you with feedback on your products, service or overall opinion of the company.

Another way you can interact with customers on Pinterest is by holding a contest or offering discounts exclusively to your Pinterest followers. Not only will this help encourage your customers to keep coming back to your website, but it will also make your loyal customers feel even better about sticking with your brand – and your new customers are more likely to remain long-term customers if you actively engage with them and help reward them for their loyalty!

4. You Can Raise Awareness

Even non-profits can take advantage of Interest as a marketing tool. For example, animal shelters can post photos of dogs and cats looking for a home, as well as create a board showcasing photos of animals who were already adopted. Several shelters have already started doing this on Pinterest!

No matter what type of non-profit you run, you can use Pinterest to share photos of the people or things your business affects, as well as images of any current or upcoming projects your non-profit is working on. This is a great way to connect with your followers, and enables you to explain your cause in.

5. You Can Showcase your Company’s Personality

Pinterest focuses heavily on lifestyle, meaning it’s a good idea to showcase your company’s personality on a special board dedicated to that. Customers like getting a peek behind the scenes of a brand, knowing there are real people working to create the products or services your company produces.

Create a pinboard with images and/or videos of your employees at work, marketing your brand, attending company outings, etc. This will make your company seem more human and relatable, and potentially help gain even more followers and customers.

While Pinterest is still fairly new, it’s quickly becoming one of the fastest growing social media platforms around. Whether you need to build exposure, drive more traffic to your site, raise awareness about a specific cause or charity, or any number of things, take advantage of this free marketing tool to help your business be as successful as possible.

Lucky for you, it’s actually quite easy to pull off.

Registering the Widget Area

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up the eleven40′s functions.php file and scroll to the bottom where you’ll see the /** Register widget areas */ note.

After that, go ahead and place the following code below – this will register another widget area called Home Featured.

genesis_register_sidebar( array(
    'id' => 'home-featured',
    'name' => __( 'Home Featured', 'eleven40' ),
    'description' => __( 'This is the home featured section.', 'eleven40' ),
) );

Hook the Home Featured Widget Area

Next, you’ll want to open up the eleven40′s home.php file and place the code below directly after the opening <?php tag:

/** Add the home featured section */
add_action( 'genesis_before_loop', 'eleven40_home_featured' );
function eleven40_home_featured() {

    /** Do nothing on page 2 or greater */
    if ( get_query_var( 'paged' ) >= 2 )
        return;

    genesis_widget_area( 'home-featured', array(
    'before' => '<div class="home-featured widget-area">',
    ) );

}

The function above will hook the Home Featured widget are just before the loop, which is at the top of the content area on the homepage.

Throw in a Little CSS Styling

Since I’m not a fortune teller, I can’t see into the crystal ball of all use-cases with this tutorial. However, I’ll give a little direction here.

If you plan to use the Home Featured widget area for a text widget, then you might want to add some CSS like this:

.home-featured {
    background-color: #f5f5f5;
    border: 1px solid #ddd;
    padding: 25px;
}

Whether you are a novice blogger looking for a potential source of income or a pro who wants to increase their revenue, here are 8 ways to monetize your blog.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click, or PPC advertising, is one of the simplest ways to monetize your blog. By using a program such as Google AdSense, Chitika, AdBrite and other similar programs, advertisements are placed on your blog. You make money every time a reader clicks on those ads, so the more traffic you have, the more you can potentially make using this method.

2. Cost Per Thousand Advertising

With cost per thousand advertising, or CPM for short, advertisers place ads on your blogs and the blogger is paid for each time that ad shows up. While this method can bring money to even novice bloggers, this type of advertising really pays off for blogs that have a lot of traffic. The more page views you receive, the more money you can make with CPM advertising.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Arguably one of the most popular ways to monetize a blog, affiliate marketing simply means you use your blog to recommend products or services that are likely to be of interest to your readers. By using resources like LinkShare, Commission Junction, Click Bank and other affiliate programs, you can link to relevant products and earn a commission each time a reader purchases a product via your links. The best part? You simply link to the product or service being offered; there’s no hard selling involved on your part.

To give you a detailed idea of what affiliate marketing involves, think about your blog’s niche. For example, do you maintain a beauty blog? Using affiliate programs, you can link to relevant beauty products in your posts and earn money each time those products are purchased by readers via your links.

4. Sponsored Posts

If you have a fairly popular blog, you may be able to use sponsored posts as a way to monetize your blog. With sponsored posts, a company or person will pay you to write a specific post about their products, business and the like and post it on your blog. Oftentimes, the post will have to follow a very specific format based on what the purchaser wants.

Sponsored posts are a quick and easy way to earn money, but it’s important to maintain the integrity of your blog and only accept sponsored post opportunities that you feel are relevant to your readership.

5. Paid Reviews

Similar to sponsored posts, you can also monetize your blog by accepting paid review opportunities. With this monetization method, you are paid to write a review about a product, company or service on your blog. The amount you can make varies, and you should be careful when accepting paid review opportunities. If it’s not a product you are interested in, you shouldn’t accept it just for the money – you may lose your readers’ respect that way.

Instead, only accept paid review opportunities that appeal to you, and be sure to present your honest opinions when writing the review. Sites like PayPerPost and ReviewMe are two examples that help you find paid review opportunities.

6. E-Book Sales

E-Books are a popular way of monetizing your blog, especially if you have something relevant to say. Check out online resources to learn how to write and market an e-book, and make sure that you are an expert in your chosen topic before you attempt to sell your e-book.

Even though e-books tend to sell for very cheap, they are a great potential source of income and can sell quickly.

7. Donations

Few bloggers can make a decent amount of money by asking for donations, but I included it here because it is a viable way to monetize your blog, especially if you have a large and dedicated readership.

Programs like PayPal have an easy way to add a “Donation” button to your blog, where readers can click to donate however much they can afford. If you choose this method, do not constantly ask readers to donate. If your content is valuable to them and they respect you as an authority in your field, the donations will happen on their own. However, it’s a good idea to make a quick post calling attention to the donate button, and mentioning what it’s for so your readers are aware of it – but don’t expect to get rich using this monetization method.

8. Article Marketing

Using resources such as Associated Content and Squidoo, you can market your articles while receiving quality backlinks to your blog while creating a potential source of income in addition to anything else you’re already doing.

Article marketing isn’t for everyone, but it’s an easy way for beginner bloggers to start trying to make money from their blog. Additionally, it’s a great form of advertising and can be potentially lucrative in the long run – if you’re willing to dedicate time and effort to making this monetization method work for you.

While there are numerous ways to monetize your blog, the 8 ways listed above are arguably some of the most popular and effective methods for beginners.

For those of you who live under a rock, there’s a new rage on the internet and it’s called Pinterest. Here’s what it is:

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

If you’re like most of us, you know exactly what Pinterest is, and you’ve probably heard a number of people talking about it. Some people think that Pinterest is a “timesuck” or “online bulletin board”, but to others it’s a huge source of traffic.

Don’t Believe Me?

ProBlogger founder Darren Rowse wrote a really good blog post recently about how he overlooked a 1000 visitor a day source of traffic.

Or you can see what Nester thinks about Pinterest and blogging. She’s a home decor blogger, and knows a thing or two about that niche.

Many folks are pigeonholing Pinterest as a website for women – but I’m seeing more and more people (as in guy friends of mine) sign up and using it as well.

Adding the “Pin It” Button

I won’t tortue you any more, so here’s how you add a Pinterest “Pin It” button to your site. As with all tutorials, this assumes you’re using the Genesis Framework.

The first step is to create a file named single.php and place the code you see below. Save the file and upload it to your child theme’s directory on your server.

With Pinterest, you have three options for the “Pin It” button display – horizontal, vertical and no count. Choose one of the three options – not all of them.

Horizontal button display:

<?php
add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button', 5 );
function pinterest_share_button() {
	
    /** Horizontal */
    printf( '<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=%s&media=%s" class="pin-it-button" count-layout="horizontal">Pin It</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>', urlencode( get_permalink() ), urlencode( genesis_get_image( array( 'format' => 'url' ) ) ) );

}

genesis();

Vertical button display:

<?php
add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button', 5 );
function pinterest_share_button() {
	
    /** Vertical */
    printf( '<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=%s&media=%s" class="pin-it-button" count-layout="vertical">Pin It</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>', urlencode( get_permalink() ), urlencode( genesis_get_image( array( 'format' => 'url' ) ) ) );

}

genesis();

No-count button display:

<?php
add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button', 5 );
function pinterest_share_button() {
	
    /** No-count */
    printf( '<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=%s&media=%s" class="pin-it-button" count-layout="none">Pin It</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>', urlencode( get_permalink() ), urlencode( genesis_get_image( array( 'format' => 'url' ) ) ) );

}

genesis();

Which Image Will Show?

The pinterest_share_button function will pull in the genesis_get_image function, which first searches your post to see if you have set a Featured Image.

If you haven’t set a Featured Image, the fallback will be the first image found in the gallery for that particular post.

Placing the Pinterest “Pin It” Button

The sample code given above will place the Pin It button directly above your post content. If you’d like to display it after the post content, replace this code:

add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button', 5 );

With this code:

add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button' );

If you would like to place the Pin It button before and after the post content, your entire single.php file would look like this:

<?php
add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button', 5 );
function pinterest_share_button() {
	
    /** Horizontal */
    printf( '<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=%s&media=%s" class="pin-it-button" count-layout="horizontal">Pin It</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>', urlencode( get_permalink() ), urlencode( genesis_get_image( array( 'format' => 'url' ) ) ) );

}

add_action( 'genesis_post_content', 'pinterest_share_button_after' );
function pinterest_share_button_after() {
	
    /** Horizontal */
    printf( '<a href="http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=%s&media=%s" class="pin-it-button" count-layout="horizontal">Pin It</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://assets.pinterest.com/js/pinit.js"></script>', urlencode( get_permalink() ), urlencode( genesis_get_image( array( 'format' => 'url' ) ) ) );

}

genesis();

Styling the Pinterest “Pin It” Button

There probably isn’t much that you’ll want to style with the “Pin It” button. Depending on where you place it you might want to adjust margin or padding.

Here’s how you can target the Pinterest “Pin It” button through CSS:

.entry-content iframe {
    margin: 10px 0;
}

Oh – by the way – if you’re a business or consumer and want to connect with others on Pinterest, check out Pin Savvy Social.

Special Thanks
Thanks to Nathan Rice for writing the Pinterest “Pin It” function used in this tutorial.

Maybe you’re a publisher for an online newspaper or magazine – or if you’re like me, just a regular guy who likes to have a number of categories for his blog.

Either way, there’s a really neat feature we’ve placed inside the Blog Page template of the Genesis Framework that many folks don’t know exists.

Blog Page Settings

You might think that the Blog Page options on the Theme Settings page is somewhat limited. There you have the option to select either “All Categories” or a single category to be used on your blog page.

Here’s a screenshot which shows the Blog Page settings:

The question that you’re probably thinking is this – “What happens if I want to publish blog pages for each category that I have on my blog?”

As it appears, the Blog Page template can either be used to show all categories or just one – but looks are deceiving as there’s a way to create multiple instances of a blog page which showcases single categories.

Ok, this is really something easy to do – so follow the steps below carefully.

What’s Your Category ID?

The first thing you will want to do is identify what the category ID is of the category you want to use for your blog page. There are two ways to do that:

Option 1 – Download and activate the Reveal IDs plugin for WordPress.

Option 2 – Go to the Posts > Categories screen in your dashboard and edit the category. When you’re on the edit categories screen, take a look at your browser address bar and you’ll see something like this (note the part in bold):

…edit-tags.php?action=edit&taxonomy=category&tag_ID=1&post_type=post

Create Your Blog Page

Next, you’ll want to add a new page – be sure to select the Blog Page template from the Page Attributes box on the right hand side of your screen.

After you’ve done that, scroll down the screen below the post editor and you’ll see a box called “Custom Fields”.

Add a new custom field, using query_args as the name, and then type cat=1 as the value. (or replace 1 with the category ID you want to use for your blog page)

Here’s how that should look:

Publish Your Blog Page

Go ahead – click Publish and then check out your blog page!

If you want to create multiple blog pages using single categories simply rinse and repeat. I’ve used this same process for the Tutorials page here on my site.

This is a great way for sites with many topics or channels to have individual blog pages for each one.

Neat stuff, eh?

Apparently Google wants to put website publishers in a quandary between generating ad revenue and establishing search engine rankings.

Yesterday Google announced that it was improving it’s search algorithm which specifically targets the above-the-fold experience for users.

What Exactly Does This Mean?

That’s the million dollar question, as this algorithm change seems to affect those who put high value on advertisements that are placed above the fold.

Don’t worry – if you’re a real publisher, you’re smart enough to know that a few well-placed ads probably won’t result in any noticeable changes for you.

Don’t believe me? Here’s exactly what Google says:

This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithm tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

If you own a splog, however, you might want to rearrange a few things.

It’s Really Not that Big a Deal, or Is It?

The new above-the-fold algoritm change from Google has been said to only impact about 1% of global searches.

Now hold on, don’t start playing the percentage Russian Roulette game and disregard the improvement. Check out what Alan Bleiweiss has to say about this:

As is typical of Google, Matt (Cutts) says in the article that this change is really minor – in that it should only impact about 1 percent of all searches globally. That of course, leads too many people to think “oh cool – I can ignore this one too…”

Alan kinda knows what he’s talking about – he is a Director of Search Services and writes for Search Engine Journal. He goes on to say:

Except that’s a big mistake. All too common in our industry. With billions upon billions of searches taking place, that’s an aweful lot of searches impacted. Heck, given how the “real” impact of the “not-provided” turned out to be compared to Google’s initial claims, people really need to pay attention here. Because this one IS something you can respond to and address, a lot more readily than making up for the “not-provided” hit you or your client sites might have taken.

Fearing the Wrath of Google

Obviously this isn’t a major algorithm change from Google, but it can impact a group of folks who walk the fine line between generating content and placing ads on their site – primarily above the fold.

I’m not thinking twice about this change, as you can see, because my site doesn’t have any ads on it. Nor do any of our products sites.

In my opinion, the sites that thrive off of page views – perhaps celebrity blogs and other media sharing websites – will be the ones most affected.

Yes, We’re Looking at YOU

So if you showcase a questionable amount of content on your pages, with a pretty decent emphasis on showing ads above the fold, you might want to reconsider your site layout. Or business model. Or both.

In other words, you’ve been warned (by Google, that is). If you’re up for losing revenue by ignoring this latest algorithm change, that’s your call.

As the idiom goes, “As you make your bed, so you must lie in it…”

Social media has opened up an astounding number of ways to stay connected, and these are the top reasons why you should use social media for your business.

1. You Stay Visible

With everyone and their brother currently using social media to promote their brand, it’s important for any business to take advantage of the visibility social media allows you to have. By constantly updating your social media accounts you stay visible, connect with potential customers and remain in the forefront of someone’s mind when you’re constantly working on creating a visible brand.

With that being said, you need to think of ways to connect to your customer base in order to remain a visible brand. For example, you can share your company’s story in order to help other social media users feel connected to you and invested in your success. You can also highlight a product or service that you offer in a casual way, getting the word out about your company and what they offer without being too “promotional.” There are numerous ways to stay visible as a business using social media; it’s simply a matter of getting out there and connecting with people.

2. It Helps with Customer Retention

Any business will benefit from customer retention, and social media allows you to do just that. You can direct consumers to your Facebook page and Twitter account via your regular business website or blog, giving customers an easy way to follow your business and stay updated on the latest company news, product offerings and the like.

Additionally, social media allows you to connect with your customers in a way that makes them already feel like they know you, especially if you share your personal stories and anecdotes about your business. In this way, they are more likely to make a purchase via social media without a lot of sales pitches needed.

3. Customer Service is Easier and Quicker

So many people use social media that many of them choose to engage with businesses regularly in this way. Not only is it easier than being put on hold for hours via a telephone, but it’s a lot quicker as well. Any time a customer has a question, a problem or simply wants to compliment your business on a job well done, they can do so quickly and efficiently using social media. In turn, your company can respond to all customer inquiries just as fast.

By using social media to improve your customer service, this also helps with customer retention. As you can see, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be using social media to help connect with your customer base!

4. It Can Increase Search Engine Rankings

Facebook and Twitter rank among the highest when it comes to social media sites, so make sure to update those frequently if you want to increase your search engine rankings for your business. Will this happen overnight? Likely not, but with frequent updates and staying on top of your customer base, you will be directing targeted traffic back to your website and helping your business rank higher in search engines.

You can also ask your current customers to post reviews about your business on popular review sites such as Yelp; the more reviews your business has, the more people are talking about it and getting the word out. Of course, it’s important to search frequently for what is being said about you, so you can also stay on top of any negative reviews that may be posted that you need to address.

5. By Golly… It’s Free

As far as a cost-effective form of advertising goes, using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are your best bet – because they are all free! By signing up for accounts with these social media sites, you can begin advertising and promoting your brand and products/services right away, without spending a dime on other online advertising methods.

There really isn’t a reason you shouldn’t be using social media for your business, especially when it allows you to connect with customers on a deeper level and help you grow your brand quickly, efficiently and cheaply. Within a few moments, your brand can have a visible presence in social media and will only continue to grow if you stay on top of it for the long-term.

While you may not think your business needs a blog, there are a number of reasons why it should. With the availability of both free and inexpensive blogging platforms, your business can set up a blog in a matter of minutes and begin promoting your brand and connecting with customers. If you still aren’t convinced, here are five reasons why your business should have a blog.

1. It Builds Traffic

There will always be a correlation between traffic and sales. The more traffic you have coming to your website, the more likely it is you’ll make a sale. With that said, having a blog you update frequently will allow you to direct targeted traffic to your business website, thereby increasing the chances you’ll make a sale.

By linking your blog to other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, you’ll also be building traffic and connecting with your customer base. Whenever you publish a new blog post, make sure to post a link to it on your social media accounts to attract more prospective buyers and build your brand.

2. It Increases your Credibility

People are more likely to purchase products or services from businesses they feel like they already “know,” and having a blog that you regularly update can help foster a community and allow your readers to feel like they know you, even if you’ve never met face to face.

Every time you interact with your readers, by encouraging comments and responding to comments left, you are building your relationship with potential customers. By building those relationships, you are effectively creating a face for your brand, thereby increasing the likelihood of more sales. A blog is a simple way to do this, and allows customers to consistently reach out to you and stay updated on new developments, products or services offered by your business.

3. It Allows for Better Customer Service

By creating a blog for your business, it allows your customers to contact you. They don’t have to be put on hold, or wait for office hours to call you. All of the info about your company should be found on your blog, so customers who have any questions or want to find out more about your business can easily do so.

Additionally, a blog is one of the best ways to update customers on new products or services being offered. You can also respond to customer inquiries quickly and more efficiently, and you can gain valuable feedback from your readership while using that feedback to make improvements and build a better business, as well as business relationships, with your client base.

4. It Establishes you as An Expert

A blog helps establish you as an expert in your field, and if you regularly update it with relevant content, you reinforce the idea that you know what you are talking about. Making sure you update your blog frequently with content that is valuable to readers also helps establish you as their go-to person when it comes to your particular niche, be it consulting, editing or any other type of business.

By blogging regularly, you are building a visible presence on the web and also fostering relationships with potential customers while establishing your expertise for your particular niche.

5. It Gives you a Voice

Every business needs a voice, and a blog is a simple way to do that. These days, anyone can post anything online about a company, be it good or bad. By starting a blog for your business, you can help manage your reputation and give your business the voice and authority it needs to thrive.

The marketplace for any business is normally competitive, so by starting a blog that you update regularly, you are giving your company a voice on the internet. Customers can read your posts and establish in their minds that you are a credible authority, and you can interact with them frequently while establishing your reputation on the web.

While there are many reasons your business should have a blog, these are the most compelling reasons. If you haven’t started a blog for your business yet, you definitely should – it’s a cost effective, easy way to interact with your existing customer base, gaining new customers and establishing your expertise.

In today’s world, building an email list and conversion optimization are essential if you are trying to establish a successful business. Nothing matters and all of your efforts become meaningless if you can’t capture and create.

I’ve already taught you how to kickstart your email list, and now I want to show you how to create a landing page with the Genesis Framework.

Getting Started

First you need to do is create a page_landing.php file, which you’ll place inside your child theme’s folder. Start that off by placing this code at the top of it:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Landing
*/

This will generate the Landing page template, and make it available in the Page Attributes > Template box on the ‘edit page’ screen in your dashboard.

Next, you’ll want to place a function that will create a custom body class for the pages that use the Landing Page template. Place this code next in your file:

// Add custom body class to the head
add_filter( 'body_class', 'add_body_class' );
function add_body_class( $classes ) {
   $classes[] = 'custom-landing';
   return $classes;
}

This will place the custom-landing class into the source code which you can use to target various CSS for your landing page such as content width, etc.

Next you’ll want to run the Genesis loop and remove elements that aren’t necessary for landing pages. Place this code next in your file:

// Remove header, navigation, breadcrumbs, footer widgets, footer 
add_filter( 'genesis_pre_get_option_site_layout', '__genesis_return_full_width_content' );
remove_action( 'genesis_header', 'genesis_header_markup_open', 5 );
remove_action( 'genesis_header', 'genesis_do_header' );
remove_action( 'genesis_header', 'genesis_header_markup_close', 15 );
remove_action( 'genesis_after_header', 'genesis_do_nav' );
remove_action( 'genesis_after_header', 'genesis_do_subnav' );
remove_action( 'genesis_before_loop', 'genesis_do_breadcrumbs');
remove_action( 'genesis_before_footer', 'genesis_footer_widget_areas' );
remove_action( 'genesis_footer', 'genesis_footer_markup_open', 5 );
remove_action( 'genesis_footer', 'genesis_do_footer' );
remove_action( 'genesis_footer', 'genesis_footer_markup_close', 15 );

genesis();

This will force a full-width layout, remove the Header, Primary and Secondary Navigation, Breadcrumbs, Footer Widgets and the Footer from your page.

Save your file and upload it into your child theme’s folder on your server.

Styling Your Landing Page

Now that you have your landing page template built, it’s time to style it so that it “looks” like a landing page. More than likely you’ll want to do some things to it to make it stand out.

Because child themes have varying CSS, it’s hard to provide code that will work for all cases. Here’s an example of how you would target your landing pages:

.custom-landing #inner {
    margin: 20px auto;
    width: 700px;
}

Wait, Here’s Another Option

If you are a serious online publisher, listen up.

The last stop before action is some form of landing page. And the best landing pages thrive due to a certain set of best practices to get more calls to action.

For more comprehensive control over your landing pages, I suggest that you check the Premise Landing Page software from Copyblogger Media.

Premise allows you to quickly and easily create 8 critical landing page styles in WordPress, add visual flair with included custom graphics, and control fonts, colors, and styles.

As we draw near to the release of Genesis 1.8, I wanted to discuss the CSS changes that we are making which relates to the menus. This includes the Header Right, Primary and Secondary menu locations that are used in Genesis child themes.

Currently, menu item links are targeted with the following CSS:

#header ul.nav li a,
#header ul.menu li a {
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    font-size: 13px;
    padding: 7px 10px 5px;
    position: relative;
    text-decoration: none;
}

#nav li a {
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    font-size: 13px;
    padding: 7px 10px 5px;
    position: relative;
    text-decoration: none;
}

#subnav li a {
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    font-size: 13px;
    padding: 7px 10px 5px;
    position: relative;
    text-decoration: none;
}

You’ll notice that the declarations for each menu selector are identical. This results in a lot of unnecessary CSS in a stylesheet, and I wanted to consolidate that a bit.

With the release of Genesis 1.8, my first instinct was simply to combine the selectors, which would have resulted in this:

#header ul.nav li a,
#header ul.menu li a,
#nav li a,
#subnav li a {
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    font-size: 13px;
    padding: 7px 10px 5px;
    position: relative;
    text-decoration: none;
}

That definitely would have been a step in the right direction, but I started digging deeper into the source code output and noticed something. Here’s what I saw:

By default, WordPress adds the ‘menu’ class to the unordered list that’s generated when using the custom menu widget. Unfortunately, as of Genesis 1.7.1, both the primary and secondary navigation menus do not include the same class.

At first I was frustrated, but then I saw a huge opportunity because I knew we could easily address this situation. In Genesis 1.8, we added some classes to the output of the primary and secondary navigation menus, which you can see below:

Not only did we include the ‘menu’ class, we also added ‘menu-primary’ and ‘menu-secondary’ classes as well for the primary and secondary navigation respectively.

You might be asking yourself how this helps, right? Well now we can define the previously discussed CSS like this:

.menu a {
    color: #fff;
    display: block;
    font-size: 13px;
    padding: 7px 10px 5px;
    position: relative;
    text-decoration: none;
}

We’ve trimmed the CSS down from 27 lines to 8 – and this is just one instance of a CSS selector. (There are many used when defining navigation menus.)

To show you really how impressive this is, I’ve done the math for you. With Genesis 1.8, this consolidation has removed over 200 lines of CSS from the stylesheet.

Extrapolate this process over the CSS used for a theme such as Lifestyle which has 10 color styles requiring definitions for menu styling, and you’ll start to see just much overhead this will save.

How to Customize Menus with CSS

It’s pretty obvious that consolidating the CSS used across 3 menus assumes that the menus are styled identically. With the Genesis default stylesheet, this is the case.

So if you are wondering what happens when you want to style them differently, it’s very easy to do. With the additional classes we’ve provided, all you need to do is be more specific when it comes to the differing CSS you wand to add.

Let’s say that you wanted to apply different border CSS for the Header Right, Primary and Secondary navigation menus. This is actually what we’ve done in the default stylesheet so we’ve already built in sample code. Just add the following:

#header .menu {
    border: 1px solid #ddd;
    box-sizing: border-box;
}

.menu-primary {
    border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;
    border-top: 1px solid #ddd;
}

.menu-secondary {
    border-bottom: 1px solid #ddd;
    border-top: none;
}

Rinse and Repeat

And that’s it. If you want to change link colors, padding, background images or anything else with the navigation menus, simply target with the CSS you see above.

It’s that easy and you can have a significantly smaller style.css file because of the menu consolidation example we’ve placed in Genesis 1.8.

(And yes, we’ll be updating child themes with this.)

Happy Coding!