In our original post about the HEATWAVE Grand Finale, we mentioned that we would be providing some marketing materials for the LightCMS resellers out there to use to promote the CMS on your own websites. Well, we didn't have them quite ready on Wednesday, but now they are ready for release. Thanks for your patience and please see below.
What in the world does this do?
If you are one of our hundreds of LightCMS resellers that use our CMS to build websites for your own clients, you likely want to tell them about the features of the CMS. And since those features get upgraded and expanded quite often, it can be difficult to keep your own feature list up to date. So, we've had in mind for a while now to find a way to let you display marketing content on your own site that is dynamically generated by us and kept up to date automatically whenever we make any changes.
So, we are providing two javascript snippets that, if added to your own web pages, will dynamically render onto your own website content that we generate and maintain. One snippet is for our features list, and the other is for our pricing grid.
Now, on the versions that we maintain on our own sites (like LightCMS), you will see extra content targeted at resellers and account holders — stuff that you wouldn't want your own clients to see. Rest assured, that content is not included in what we publish on your site. We very carefully comb through our content and only send out to you that which you would want your own clients to see.
Also, since you guys might charge different pricing to your clients than we charge to ours, we have allowed you to specify your own prices in the pricing grid script. More on this below.
How does it work?
Very easily, actually. Simply cut and paste the following code snippets onto your web pages wherever you want them to display.
Features list
See an example of the unstyled reseller features list set inside one of our standard templates. Copy and paste the code below to display the list on your website.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://publishpath.com/scripts/resellerfeatures.js"></script>
Special considerations: The features list can be displayed in either one or two columns. Please see below for more information on styling.
Pricing grid
See an example of the unstyled reseller pricing grid set inside one of our standard templates. Copy and paste the code below to display the grid on your website.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://publishpath.com/scripts/resellerpricinggrid0,29,49,99,199.js"></script>
Special considerations: You can specify the prices included on the pricing grid by changing the numbers listed in the script. It starts with "0" for the free package and then continues with Basic, Plus, Pro, and Premier. Set them to whatever you would like and your prices will be displayed. By default, we have included our suggested retail prices.
What about styling?
In order to provide you with ultimate flexibility to create your own styles, we have not included any styles inside the script (other than styles required to create the popup help functionality on the pricing grid). The markup is pure and will take on the style of whatever site you place the script in (you can see this on the examples above which are included in our templates with no special styles applied). That said, here are a few helpful ideas for styling the lists.
You can use our styles as a starting point on the pricing grid
If you want, you are welcome to take a look at the style sheets we have created for the pricing grid on own marketing websites for WaterCMS, SkyCMS and LightCMS. You are welcome to utilize these style sheets as a starting point for your own styles or even link directly to them to utilize them as is. You can find them at the following links:
Some basic CSS to add borders to the pricing grid
Adding borders to the pricing grid makes things a little easier to read. So, here are a few simple CSS statements you can add to your style sheet to achieve basic borders. Naturally, there's much more that you can do with CSS, but this will at least turn on some basic borders easily if you need a little help getting started.
div.tableholder { border: 2px solid #333; padding: 5px; }
table.signup td { border: 1px solid #333; padding: 5px; }
table.signup th { border: 1px solid #333; padding: 5px; }
table.signup { border-collapse: collapse; }
You can style the features list in one or two columns
We've balanced the content on the features list into two columns. Each column is wrapped in a div. So, by default, the divs will display stacked on top of each other creating a single column of features that fills its containing element (like on our example site). Or, by applying styles to the divs, you can allow them to display in two-column form. Here are the CSS statements we use to create the two column effect.
#featuresColOne {
float:left; margin-right:5%; width:47%; }
#featuresColTwo { float: right; width: 47%; }
Enjoy!
This replicable content is the result of a lot of planning and work and we are very excited to see it released. We hope you will find it useful as you continue to build and grow your own business around the LightCMS platform.
Posted on
Fri, August 29, 2008
by Tim Wall