If you’ve been wanting to create a membership site so that you can offer your content or digital products to customers and require them to register and pay a one-time or recurring monthly fee to access the content or downloads, then Wordpress is one of the best and easiest ways to do it.

If you’re not familiar with Wordpress, then you can check it out at at www.wordpress.org.

This is what they say about Wordpress in the opening paragraph:

“WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.”

I have found Wordpress to be invaluable to me in my internet business. It is free, easy to install and use, and extremely versatile.

There are hundreds and hundreds of free themes that you can install to make your site look exactly as you want it to.

There are also a lot of premium Wordpress themes that can be purchased at very reasonable prices, and these premium themes can be had for just about any specialty niche or web site type that you can imagine.

Examples of premium themes can be seen at iTheme Premium Wordpress Themes.

There are also hundreds and hundreds of plugins available for Wordpress, and these plugins can adapt Wordpress to do just about any task you can imagine. Many plugins can be had for free, and some specialized plugins require that you purchase them, most times at very reasonable prices considering the job they can do for you.

The first step in creating a Wordpress based membership site is to install Wordpress. It is easy to install Wordpress from your web hosting account using Fantastico. You can also download and install Wordpress from the www.wordpress.org site, and they furnish explicit instructions on how to do it.

Next, after making all of the initial settings in Wordpress, you will need a plugin to handle the membership chores for you. I have used a plugin called Your Member and also a plugin called Digital Access Pass to create my membership sites. These are both plugins that you would need to purchase, and you can learn about the features of both by visiting the above sites.

Both of these plugins include explicit instructions on installing them and setting them up on your site, and that is not covered in this article.After you purchase either plugin, it is a simple matter of downloading a zip file, unzipping it, and uploading it to your web hosting server. Then you follow their instruction and tutorials on configuration and usage. YourMember also has an active forum that is a super place to ask questions and get answers on any problems you may be having.

After you get everything set up and working, you begin adding content to your site, and you can make the content available to anyone who visits your site, or you can show only part of the content and require them to sign up and pay a one-time or recurring monthly fee to view the rest of the content. You can also require them to pay for access to your download files, either a one-time fee, or a recurring monthly fee.

Both plugins handle payments through Paypal, and after you get that set up, it is pretty much an automatic process.

The plugins handle registrations, payments, keeps up with recurring payments and members status for you, and it’s all done automatically.

You just keep adding more content to your site, keep signing up more members, and watch your business grow.

I also have a detailed video tutorial on creating a membership site using Wordpress and a free plugin, and you can view details on that at my TutorDaddy Video Tutorial site at www.TutorDaddy.com.

Best Of Luck,

Lewis Poteet
www.TutorDaddy.com
www.TutorDaddyTraining.com

Wordpress Premium Themes - are they worth it?

Premium Wordpress Themes are starting to pop up all over the place. This means more choice for us (the consumer) but because of the large number of people offering Premium themes it is often hard to distinguish the good from the bad.

There have been a few changes recently though, one in particular is that Revolution has now gone open source, although you do have to pay for support. This is probably a smart on their part as more people will most likely try their themes out and realise they then need support. Hopefully this move will get rid of some of those people trying to make quick money by selling cheap and nasty generic themes which shouldn’t even be classified as Premium.

I’ve listed up a few of the best Premium themes that I’ve come across.

My favourite one at the moment is WP-VYBE.

1) WP-VYBE
No. of themes: 12
Pricing: $99 (single), $199 (multiple), $299 (developer). But there are cheaper themes from $49 up.
Type of themes: Magazine
Customization services: Possible through other developers.

Notes:Theme settings page in your Wordpress control pane, 2-column or 3-column layouts, 10 different color options, Gravatar integration, Optional banner ad integration, Optional built-in post thumbnails, Optional logo/header image integration via control panel, Built-in drop-down navigation for sub-categories and sub-pages, widgetized sidebars and alot more….

2) ARTHEMIA
No. of themes: 1 (but customization through admin panel is possible)
Pricing: $70 (1 site), $140 (5-site), $240 (developer’s pack)
Type of themes: online magazine, corporate, personal blog
Customization service: Nothing mentioned

Notes: Flexible theme admin panel, category colour assignment, auto-thumbnail old posts, banner and adsense management, show or hide headline spoilers, adsense friendly.

3) PRESS 75
No. of themes: 3
Pricing: $75 (single), $150 (mulit-site), $250 (developer’s license)
Type of theme: Video/TV themed
Customization service: None listed

Notes: Ability to post using videos from several sources including Blip, TV, Flickr, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo and YouTube. You can separate the blog from the video and there is an embed code allowing others to embed videos on their site.

4) WOO THEMES
No. of themes: 10
Pricing: $70 (single) , $150 (multiple) for each theme
Type of themes: Business, CMS, Magazine/News, Personal blog, Portfolio
Customization services: none advertised.

Notes: Theme options backend, custom write panels (to make the addition of custom fields easier), same base backend for all themes.

5) ZIDALGO
No. of themes: 2
Pricing: $75 (singl), $249 (developer’s license)
Type of themes: News/Magazine
Customization services: None advertised

Notes: Google adsense, Widget, plugin ready, custom category search, author pages, 100% Valid XHTML/CSS, cross-browser tested.

6) MIMBO PRO
No. of themes: 1
Pricing: $99 (single), $199 (developer’s license)
Type of theme: Magazine
Customization services: none advertised

Notes: Built in contact form, automatic cropping and resizing of images, printer friendly rendering, custom templates for search results, date archives, sitemap, contact, author archives and category archives

7) GABFIRE
No. of themes: 2
Pricing: $59 (single), $159 (multi), $259 (developer)
Type of theme: Magazine, News, Wordpress showcase Customization services: Yes. Fill in your budget, colours to be used, example sites and message.

Notes: Built in FlickR support, video spot, Ajax tabs, custom 404 error page, Gravatar support, drop down menu