Introducing the Venus Pre-Order Theme

Now Available: Venus is a new Theme 500 child theme designed to help you promote and sell your pre-order products.

When we looked back at the origins of this theme, we were amazed to find that we began the project a year ago this month. Since those first mockups, IgnitionDeck has changed considerably as a product, eventually emerging as a fully-fledged product suite comprised of IgnitionDeck Crowdfunding, IgnitionDeck Commerce, and IgnitionDeck Enterprise.

As the product evolved, so too did the theme. The final version represented here is the result of numerous feature upgrades and facelifts, all of which, we feel, make this theme stand out among the rest.

What this new theme represents to us, is our re-commitment to the consumer-focused side of our products. IgnitionDeck is still, at its heart, a product for makers and creators. Venus is a theme for those makers and creators to put 100% of the focus on selling their new product or idea. With the power of IgnitionDeck Crowdfunding and IgnitionDeck Commerce as the backbone to your site, Venus will truly shine on the front-end to help you capture your audience’s hearts and wallets.

Widgets For The Rest of Us

We released the 500 Content Widgets with the launch of Maximus, excited about their powerful customization possibilities. But once we started to see them used in the field, we realized people only liked the power of customization when most of the heavy lifting was done for them first. We took that to heart, and so with Venus we’ve made sure that each content widget looks great by default.

Take a look at our Venus Demo to see how Venus will look with only a few fields filled in for each widget placed on your home page. While you have the ability to get much more advanced with your home page look and layout, setting up Venus to look like that demo is as simple as dropping in five widgets, adding basic content and photos where desired, and choosing the icons for that Feature Widget seen near the top. The colors, the placement of the 500 Framework image, and alignment of the text is all automatic, requiring no knowledge of HTML or CSS at all.

Instant Color

Great color makes or breaks a website.  Most websites, because of this fact, tend to be very sparse in their use of color, and often limit splashes of color to photos or buttons and links.  That’s because it’s hard to pick your own colors for every piece of the site. Because of this, most themes integrate color in a very assembly line fashion, going through the motions to ensure your single chosen color is used in a few places.

Venus needed to break this trend, going beyond our previous uses of the 500 Framework color customization possibilities.

Selecting just a few colors will result in a dazzling display of artistic creativity across your website, especially on the all-important hone page.

Always On Call To Action

When the only thing you really want your visitors to do is pre-order your product, the rest of the website should facilitate that call to action. Venus does this by placing a persistent pre-order button at the top that remains there as your visitors scroll the home page.  The menu fades away as they begin to scroll, but that button remains ever-present.  When clicked, the pre-order button activates the standard IgnitionDeck Crowdfunding purchase lightbox, which allows customers to select the level they are pre-ordering, and complete checkout.

Let Venus Tell Your Story

Whether someone is sharing an anecdote from their day, selling shoes, or discussing the events our the globe, a story is being told.  We’re surrounded by stories, and we’ve been telling stories since humans could communicate with each other.  Stories stay with us – facts and statistics are interesting but fleeting.

A dose of that human element, and that emotion that brings us together, can do wonders for getting a reader into a buyer. You don’t just want to have bullet points and simple statements fill your landing page – you want to engage with something memorable. With a story.

In a world where products abound, and everyone is selling something to everyone else, use Venus to separate yourself from the pack, tell your story, and entrance your audience.  They want to believe in you, all you have to do is show them how.