Optimize Press Review – Membership Sites

OptimizePress is a “theme” template for the popular content management system WordPress. In this review I will go over the membership templates and how to best use them in your business.

The membership site templates in OptimizePress provide the fastest way that I know to construct and design your membership site in an attractive and functional way that will impress your customers and make it easy to manage for you on an ongoing basis.

Now, before I get into the details, I want to mention that “membership sites” are not only useful for hosting ongoing long-term low-priced membership content, but are frequently used to deliver any online product within a protected area that can only be accessed after payment has been made.

So keep in mind, whether you have a product with a one-time online delivery, or a product that has modules or chapters that are released over a fixed period of time, or if you run a membership site where you add monthly content for your paid (or free) members, the membership templates in OptimizePress are a great solution for any of the above.

1. Designing Membership Sites

A well designed membership site delivers the product content in an organized way. You can divide the content into sections, chapters, modules etc. and display a navigation menu and/or side bar that makes it easy to access the content and understand how it is organized.

You can also use “membership triggers” that can tease or encourage your customers to upgrade to a higher level of membership for access to more desirable content.

All this should be enclosed in a protective area that requires the member to log in and authenticate their access with a password, so you will need a login form page and the logistics to verify the member and their subscription level.

More about membership content protection in the next paragraph. For the design layouts, OptimizePress offers integration of the WordPress menu feature to create a customizable navigation menu across the top of the page. In addition, you can display a good looking sidebar that acts as a kind of index or content directory for the content. This section is generated automatically and follows the way you arrange the hierarchy between pages in WordPress.

While all design elements can me changed easily, OptimizePress presents the membership site with very attractive graphics and layout design. For the actual content, it is ready for videos (without any additional player plug-ins) and offers additional download content in nice looking boxes with ready-made default graphics.

You will have a turn-key membership site up and running in less than an hour and it will look great, even if you just add a custom header  graphic and go with the default settings otherwise.

2. Protecting Membership Content

As I mentioned before, protecting your membership content is an essential functionality of any complete membership site setup. OptimizePress provides login page templates and a simple configuration of “error messages” for visitors who are attempting to access any content links directly, without being logged in.

You can use the built-in user registration feature in WordPress to facilitate simple protection of your content, and OptimizePress fully supports that in the templates. However, if you need more sophisticated protection of different membership levels and shopping cart integration so you can automatically enable and disable paid members, you will want to use a membership site plug-in such as Wishlist Member or Digital Access Pass.

Both of these popular membership plug-ins are fully integrated and supported by OptimizePress in the templates. There is quite a bit of a learning curve associated with getting these plug-ins to work and protect your content, and integration with the templates could be more intuitive. I will post another review comparing the two plug-ins. I have worked with both on client sites. My shortcut recommendation is leaning towards Wishlist Member (by the way: if you purchase Wishlist through our link here, we will do a complimentary set up of your OptimizePress membership template pages for you, including login, logged out and error pages).

3. Paid Content And Shopping Cart Integration

If you have paid content in your membership area and you want to automate access to that content after your customers have submitted payment, you will want to use the membership content protection plug-ins that I described in the previous paragraph, as well as a shopping cart solution that integrates with these membership plug-ins.

Wishlist Member supports a wide range of shopping carts that you can  “hook up” fairly easily. Digital Access Path is still a bit restricted in shopping cart support, but it is good to know that the two most popular shopping carts (1ShoppingCart and InfusionSoft) are both fully supported by either plug-in. You will need the professional version of 1Shoppingcart to fully integrate with Wishlist Member and DAP.

Implementing a full integration of the shopping cart and membership content protection plug-ins can get quite complicated and is not recommended to try on your own if you don’t have specific knowledge. Feel free to contact us through the Help feature if you would like to learn more about our integration services.

Once you have the technical setup in place, managing the members content with OptimizePress is easy and you will get good looking results with very little effort right out of the box. In addition, you can also customize any design elements to give your membership site the specific custom look that you are looking for. OptimizePress membership sites can compare in quality and functionality with more expensive, hosted solutions like Kajabi. The only functional advantage with Kajabi is the community feature that is built in. But not everybody likes to give their customers full access and communication capabilities to each other.

Order OptimizePress through this link and you will receive a complementary 30-minute launch strategy session as a bonus (a $250 value)

If you have not visited the Squeeze and Sales page and launch funnel review – click here

Tags: access, funnel, launch, membership, membership site, online product, optimize, OptimizePress, press, product delivery, protect, review, templates, wordrpress theme