Easiest way to get decent-looking affiliate site online?

February 5, 2013 8:59 AM

I want to get an affiliate site running without spending a huge amount of time or money on it. What I want is a pretty standard shopfront with a grid of icons, and some text explaining why I think you should buy these items, running on my own domain. All the actual sales will be done on the affiliate end, so a shopping cart is not required.

This seems like something that would have been asked before, but if so I can't find it.

I've tried a few approaches:

- Wordpress with Thesis: All going well until I found I couldn't buy a Thesis skin outright and vendors were looking for a USD100 annual subscription.
- Wordpress with another online-store theme I bought at ThemeForest: Grid layout for products turned out to be impossible, writer of the theme no longer supporting it. USD57 wasted.
- Shopify: Looks perfect but for actual sales rather than affiliate stuff, and I never was able to figure out if I could use my own domain or not
- ZenCart: Currently almost finished the install but am at work so will complete in a few hours. Documentation looks to be lacking unless you're willing to pay for it.

I must admit I am somewhat frustrated. I don't want to learn HTML and CSS and do it from scratch, or to spend hours playing with drag-and-drop designs, or to get nickel and dimed into submission. Is there some easy solution here that I am missing? I want to get to a point where I can set up a site like this easily and quickly to test a number of approaches to some markets I have in mind, and the tools are really getting in my way at the moment.

Thanks guys!

posted by StephenF to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I haven't done affiliate stuff, and I'm a software engineer so I may be coming at this from the wrong perspective; but after doing a Google image search to see what Thesis looks like, does this meet your definition of decent-looking?

That's free software and is just a bunch of flat files, so it doesn't need a database backing it and you can put it on any web host, or even Dropbox or Amazon S3 or something like that, if your registrar provides an option that would let your domain forward to a Dropbox or Amazon S3 page. The items displayed are controlled by editing this data file.

(My interpretation of what you're saying is that you simply need a single web page for each affiliate site you set up that displays a grid of images of products that a visitor would browse through, with an affiliate hyperlink provided for each product that the visitor will click to take them off to the vendor's site, and that you're the only person who will be editing the product information that appears on the page. If that's the case the software solutions you list above are massive overkill and are designed to implement way, way more features than you would appear to need so it would make sense that you find them expensive.)
posted by XMLicious at 9:40 AM on February 5, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks XMLicious. I was (and am!) hoping for something a bit prettier than that, so I will keep on trying :-)
posted by StephenF at 12:58 PM on February 5, 2013

Best answer: I hesitate to recommend yet another paid for theme but the support at Themify is very good and all the themes are very customizable - here are the ecommerce themes. Also, you can email them with pre-purchase questions.
posted by humph at 4:14 PM on February 5, 2013

Best answer: Just to be clear - are you thinking of an appearance along the lines of this screen shot of the Thesis theme for Wordpress? Because if so, the difference code-wise between the styling of that and the SIMILE Exhibit3 page I linked to is very slight, and changing things are quite simple because it's a single web page with almost all of the CSS styling collected in one place rather than an entire site.

For someone already fairly conversant in web technology, even just a student for example, I'd expect it to only take a few minutes to polish it up to look more like the Wordpress theme, particularly if you picked out fonts from somewhere like Google Web Fonts ahead of time. Maybe just find someone you could ply with beer and pizza?

I'm just concerned that you may be making things overly complicated for yourself if all you need is a single page with a grid of product pictures and links, that is only ever going to be edited by you, but you're looking at solutions that are fully-fledged database-backed server-side content management / ecommerce systems designed for multi-user editing of an entire web site.

But, hopefully your ZenCart install worked out for you and you're all set by now.
posted by XMLicious at 12:04 AM on February 6, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks again XML. I will investigate the pizza-and-beer route. What I've done in the immediate term is pay the extra to get the grid functionality from WP Commerce (grrr) and use that with my initial theme, which allows easy adding of 'product for download' which works well for affiliate stuff. It also allows future expansion in physical good easily, should I ever get that far.

I need to earn enough CSS though to be able make basic changes. If you happen to read this, is there anywhere you suggest I start for the specific aim of making WP changes?
posted by StephenF at 8:04 AM on February 6, 2013

Unfortunately, I don't use Wordpress enough to be able to make recommendations. But Ask MeFi is a good place to ask around as many people here seem to.
posted by XMLicious at 8:59 AM on February 6, 2013