I was wondering if any of you online entrepeneurs or web-savvy folks have a personal opinion on Site Build-It? They basically facilitate website design and monetization from beginning to end. It seems fairly legitimate, but I wantrd to see if anyone on here has actual experience with it? I’m looking to start a purely informational site that I would one day monetize with ads if traffic got high enough.
Any input welcome.
Thanks guys
I make a living doing what you are looking to do. I would not recommend Site Build-It, especially if you are going to start any long-term site. If you ever are really successful you will outgrow your SBI website that looks like it came out of the 1990s and transferring it to Wordpress or another CMS will not be fun.
Wordpress is simply the easiest content management system for a single person (or a few people) to run, its free and has thousands of plug-ins which offer lots of cool features and customizations with no computer knowledge. On top of that there are thousands of programs and designers who work with Wordpress, so upgrading your site to a custom theme is quick, painless, and fairly inexpensive.
As a side note, in the large majority of fields of information, ads are the worst method for monetizing a site. After all, by default ads involve someone else paying you to run their ad and then profiting enough off of your users to make a profit.
Challer, thanks for the response. So my next question is that, if WordPress is indeed the way to go, what is my first course of action if I have very little computer/ programming experience? In other words, should I start the long, painful process of learning a programming language first, or is there an inexpensive alternative to get a decent looking website up so that I can focus on producing content and maybe learn some of the technical stuff as I go?
To be honest, I’m just not sure where exactly to start. Content isn’t the issue, getting a decent site up to put the content on, however, is.
I’d be willing to shell out several hundred dollars to cover start up costs, but I’m sure hiring an outright designer is significantly more expensive than this correct?
Thanks again for your input.
[quote]challer1 wrote:
I make a living doing what you are looking to do. I would not recommend Site Build-It, especially if you are going to start any long-term site. If you ever are really successful you will outgrow your SBI website that looks like it came out of the 1990s and transferring it to Wordpress or another CMS will not be fun.
Wordpress is simply the easiest content management system for a single person (or a few people) to run, its free and has thousands of plug-ins which offer lots of cool features and customizations with no computer knowledge. On top of that there are thousands of programs and designers who work with Wordpress, so upgrading your site to a custom theme is quick, painless, and fairly inexpensive.
As a side note, in the large majority of fields of information, ads are the worst method for monetizing a site. After all, by default ads involve someone else paying you to run their ad and then profiting enough off of your users to make a profit.[/quote]
Wordpress is the most hacked content mgr there is. Look it up. I would not bother. Maybe something eles would be better. But if you think you want to go that route its up too you.
[quote]Houston07 wrote:
Challer, thanks for the response. So my next question is that, if WordPress is indeed the way to go, what is my first course of action if I have very little computer/ programming experience? In other words, should I start the long, painful process of learning a programming language first, or is there an inexpensive alternative to get a decent looking website up so that I can focus on producing content and maybe learn some of the technical stuff as I go?
To be honest, I’m just not sure where exactly to start. Content isn’t the issue, getting a decent site up to put the content on, however, is.
I’d be willing to shell out several hundred dollars to cover start up costs, but I’m sure hiring an outright designer is significantly more expensive than this correct?
Thanks again for your input.
[/quote]
I’ve been doing this for a few years and I still have no idea how to code anything, lol. Don’t waste your time doing so because there are skilled coders who do this full time and will know more than you will ever know that you can buy. Learning a programming language to make a website is like learning law so you don’t have to hire a lawyer to write a contract. You will spend 100s of hours to save a couple hundred dollars… it is a huge waste of time.
Buy a decent shared hosting service with cPanel (hostgator shared business works fine and is only 15$/month). Once you log into cPanel, you can install wordpress with a few clicks for free with Fantastico (google this). It only takes 1 minute to install wordpress and requires no coding knowledge.
Once wordpress is installed you can download a free theme or buy a ready-made theme from various websites for ~60 bucks. Once you have a theme, you can learn how to use the theme’s options (requires no programming or coding skill, just about an hour or so of reading the read-me and following instructions). You can also get a custom banner and logo made for 50$ or less.
You can have that set up and done in less than a few hours and be ready to start writing that day. Wordpress is free, so there is no issues there. You can be up and running with your own custom banner and theme for under 100 bucks.
If you decide you like doing this and your site gets popular, you can always shell out more money for a custom theme. Sites like elance often have Indian design firms that will make you a custom site for like 300 bucks. Cheaper American firms still only cost around 500-600 for a quality website since skilled designers can whip them up in 1-2 days. Even top-tier wordpress sites by the most prolific coders top out at $1000-$2000 for the purposes of any sole webmaster. Bigger projects for huge sites of course run more than that, but if you are writing all the content yourself then you should never pay more than 1-2k for a top-tier website.
If you are paying more than that, some guy is just taking your money and hiring someone else to do the site for $600-$1000 and pocketing the difference. I personally know several Americans who sell “web design” for 2000-3000 a website and promptly outsource the sites to Indian firms for 600 bucks and keep the difference.
Of course, if your site grows huge (i.e. 1000+ articles, multiple authors, etc), you might want to use another content management system, but wordpress is so mainstream that converting over to something like Drupal or Joomla is an easy process. By that point your site should be making enough money to easily pay a programmer to do this for you. When you start using off the beaten path site builders like SBI you run into trouble when you want to upgrade.
[quote]dirtman wrote:
[quote]challer1 wrote:
I make a living doing what you are looking to do. I would not recommend Site Build-It, especially if you are going to start any long-term site. If you ever are really successful you will outgrow your SBI website that looks like it came out of the 1990s and transferring it to Wordpress or another CMS will not be fun.
Wordpress is simply the easiest content management system for a single person (or a few people) to run, its free and has thousands of plug-ins which offer lots of cool features and customizations with no computer knowledge. On top of that there are thousands of programs and designers who work with Wordpress, so upgrading your site to a custom theme is quick, painless, and fairly inexpensive.
As a side note, in the large majority of fields of information, ads are the worst method for monetizing a site. After all, by default ads involve someone else paying you to run their ad and then profiting enough off of your users to make a profit.[/quote]
Wordpress is the most hacked content mgr there is. Look it up. I would not bother. Maybe something eles would be better. But if you think you want to go that route its up too you.
http://www.wordpressexploit.com/[/quote]
Wordpress is the most hacked content mgr there is because there are 72 million sites running Wordpress. If no one was running Wordpress then it would not get hacked so much. It’s the same way that Mac viruses were unheard of until more people started buying macs. Anything can be hacked, it’s just a question of popularity.
I’ll agree that it doesn’t help that there are a bunch of poorly coded plug-ins which lead to more vulnerabilities. Stick to the most popular plug-ins and this will not be an issue. I have about 70 websites running wordpress and have never had a single hack.
I’m not saying it is impossible, but then again if a skilled hacker wants in a website they are going to get in. Lulzsec and other hacking groups have recently gotten into the most secure websites. A small part-time webmaster hardly has to worry about security if they back up their site weekly.
Challer, excuse the retarded question, but…what exactly constitutes backing up a site weekly to prevent this?
Thanks for your time.
[quote]Houston07 wrote:
Challer, excuse the retarded question, but…what exactly constitutes backing up a site weekly to prevent this?
Thanks for your time.[/quote]
Or you can use backupbuddy, which is a premium plug-in I use to back up your site in your wordpress dashboard.