I’d love to use Ghost for a paid publication but I’m struggling to find a theme that fits my needs.
Given that memberships are now advertised on the frontpage and Rediverge is used as the flagship example I thought it would be easy to create something similar.
Unfortunately, the default membership theme (Lyra) is not even remotely similar and is missing many things that I think are essential.
there is no “signup box” on the front page that explains what the site is all about and contains calls to action like “learn more” or “subscribe”. (Of course, this page should only be shown to users who haven’t signed up yet, as it’s done on Rediverge).
the subscribe page does not show any pricing information. Instead, there’s just a form that prompts users to enter their email address. This means, users have to enter their email address, wait for the email, open it, before 1.) they’re able to see that you need to pay to properly sign up (I deactivated free signups and only want to allow stripe-verified paid signups like John does at Rediverge) and 2.) see how much it costs to subscribe. This does not seem very optimized for paid publications and I’m wondering if I’m overlooking something obvious.
Long story short: is there any “easy” way to create a publication like Rediverge? I’d be happy to pay for a premium theme but so far I was not able to find one that has the features described above.
I only found one similar theme that, however, is quite buggy and does not seem well-maintained. Moreover, it’s not solving the second problem mentioned above.
When creating my site, I found no theme with a call to action similar to Rediverge. Modelling that site, I did two things:
First, edited my purchased theme by creating a custom .hbs file and then calling it on the homepage, starting with instructions here Tutorials and some trial and error.
Second, I couldn’t be bothered writing my own CSS from scratch so I signed up to Webflow for a month and created my layout from that. Webflow is a visual design tool that exports HTML / CSS, and upon exporting I pulled out just the code needed and added that to the styles and the .hbs file accordingly.
Note that I have never developed anything in hbs prior and I just copied what the theme was doing, and I hadn’t used Webflow before but I am familiar with CSS/HTML. The first theme I tried this with was a pain, but once I purchased one of @fueko’s themes I had this up and running within a day. Not only that, but I had fun doing it - Fueko’s themes are easy to work with!
While I haven’t embedded a form for a call to action yet, I plan to do so soon and should hopefully be straightforward - I can’t see why not. You can see how it turned out at my blog smartstrongstylish.com. Fueko’s themes also have a paid membership subscription page, example here Membership
I would be happy with just being able to figure out how to embed the form under the title/description like in your example above. I can’t believe I’m having trouble figuring out that tiny thing, haha.
