Clipper review and discount – a WordPress coupon theme from AppThemes

Especially in an economy like this, saving money is vitally important to many people. Everyone likes to save money – even those wealthy enough that it an extra few dollars makes no difference. The old adage “a penny saved is a penny earned” still rings true today, especially with the economy where it is today. A good way to save money is to clip coupons, but ever since the popularity of newspapers has gone downhill, less and less coupons are finding their way to consumers’ hands. Savvy shoppers have began turning to the internet to find good deals on items, and to find coupons that they can use both in-person and online.

This new trend presents you, the webmaster, with a brilliant business opportunity. If you can find a way to gather available coupons and make them available to the public through a website, you will earn a lot of loyal visitors. Also, often times you can implement referral links into the outgoing links on your site, providing you with an excellent source of passive income. Searching for and gathering coupons is relatively easy if you know how to use search engines like Google – the tricky part is making a website to lay out the coupons in an organized fashion. Unless you’re a very experienced webmaster and coder, you will find making a coupon website from scratch to be quite difficult. Thankfully, there is a much easier way to make a coupon website, using WordPress!

For most webmasters, using a WordPress theme is the best way to go about building a coupon site. There are several themes available for coupon sites, but we’ve gone ahead and done the work for you, selecting the best of the best. “Clipper”, a theme by AppThemes, is by far the best coupon theme for WordPress. It is so good, in fact, that we use it on our own website here at WPdiscounts.com! However, it is important to understand that WPdiscounts is running a highly modified version of the Clipper theme. For most websites, the standard theme will be more than enough, but we wanted to go the extra step and make our website stand out from the competition, by customizing the theme. Read the rest of this AppThemes Clipper review to learn more!

frontend features

homepage screenshot of Clipper

The front end of the Clipper coupon theme for WordPress is very simple and elegant. It lays out everything that the reader is looking for without over cluttering the homepage. Highlighted on the top of the page is the search bar, which allows users to search the coupon database for whatever they are looking for. Next down is a sliding display of featured coupons. You can select these coupons yourself, or allow the theme to display random coupons or the most recent coupons. These featured coupons slowly slide from one side to the other, and there is also buttons on each end for the user to press if they want to browse the featured coupons more quickly.

Below the featured coupon display is a list of all the new coupons, with the code highlighted at the top, and the success rate displayed on the top right. The success rate is based on user votes – when they use a coupon, they can choose to give it a thumb up or a thumb down, depending on whether or not it worked for them. Below the success rate is a short description of the coupon, highlighting where it can be used and if there are any restrictions. Also listed towards the bottom is the category the coupon is placed in (which is determined by you when you post the coupon). By default, the newest uploaded coupons will be placed at the top of the list. This can be changed if you so desire.

On the right sidebar, there is an email submission form, where readers can input their email in order to have new coupons emailed to them automatically. This is an important feature, and should be noted. Gathering the email addresses of savvy shoppers is very important – you can continue to use these email addresses to send coupons and even promotional offers – just be sure to provide an “opt-out” feature for users who no longer want to receive emails from you. Under the submission form is a list of top coupons, which by default is based upon the number of comments made on a particular coupon.

backend features

The backend of this coupon theme for WordPress is excellent. It of course provides all the useful features that come standard with WordPress installations, and adds many helpful features to benefit coupon sites specifically. On the dashboard, a simple chart will immediately greet you, displaying your new coupons uploaded per day. You can choose to submit all the coupons manually by yourself, automate it using RSS feeds, or even allow your readers to submit their own coupons. You can, of course, set it up so that you have to approve everything before it goes live on your website.

settings

Clipper main menu

Under the “settings” page on your dashboard you will find a lot of features. You can change the color scheme, upload a company logo to the header, upload your Facebook and Twitter ID so users can friend/follow you, and of course an option to install Google Analytics into your site, which will give you the ability to monitor traffic closely. Under General Options you will find many options to choose what level of security you will use on your website. You can choose to moderate newly submitted coupons (highly recommended to avoid spam), automatically remove old expired coupons, allow coupon editing with or without moderation, require users to register before posting, and much more. You might be able to get away with using little to no moderation at first, but as your site grows, so will the number of bots trying to spam it!

security

To increase security/reduce spam even further, you can go to the Security/Reports page under Clipper. Here you can change settings requiring people to use a ReCaptcha when using your website. This will filter out any bots and make sure there is little to no spam on your site. You can also use Akismet from WordPress to further reduce spam. You can also change settings here for how you want to be notified if a coupon is expired or broken. The next tab over is pretty straightforward – it allows you to make blog post advertisements if you so desire.

advanced

Under the “Advanced” tab, you will find a lot of options concerning the appearance of your site, and the way your site uses URLs. If you are concerned about SEO (search engine optimization), do some research and learn how you can use custom URLs to your advantage. From the Advanced page you can set all your URLs to be exactly what you want, and set the protocol for future URLs as well. If you do not know anything about SEO, it would be wise to leave the URLs in their default state.

coupon options

coupons menu in Clipper

Moving on, you will find the “Coupon” menu on your dashboard. Here you will be able to add, update and remove coupons. If you plan to run a nice website with return customers, you should use this page a lot to moderate and weed out expired coupons. Adding a coupon manually is just like making a basic blog post on any WordPress site, so you should have no difficulty figuring that out. The Category tab is also very similar to most WordPress sites, and simply allows you to add a new category by name and slug (URL). The next menu, Coupon Tags, should be used as much as possible. You want to tag every coupon with relevant words or phrases, so that users can find other similar coupons very easily. The next option is Stores. This should be used for any store or company that you have coupons for quite often. Essentially creating a store is like creating a new category. The last option Coupon Types is to change the coupon type. Here you can select whether the coupon is an instant % off coupon, a mail in rebate, a cash back offer, etc.

pricing & licensing info

When it comes to pricing packages, there is a Standard version that costs $69, and a Club theme membership that costs $199. Both items include unlimited licenses to use on multiple websites and 12 months free updates & support.

DEMO & MORE INFORMATION

Clipper discount code

If you want to buy this great coupon theme for WordPress check out our AppThemes discount code page for the latest coupon code to buy your Clipper theme with discount!

summary

In conclusion, this is an excellent WordPress coupon theme to choose for your website. It offers a sleek, simplistic design that it easy to use for even novice web users. The backend is also fairly straightforward, but can always be modified to fit your needs. There are plenty of options to control spam/bogus coupons, which will most likely be your main task while running a coupon site. This coupon theme for WordPress is much more customizable than most other coupon themes we have come across, so more advanced webmasters will love this theme for that reason, among many others.