Website Creation Platforms

is what platform are you going to be using to create this website. Um, the common ones that you're going to see are Wix, Weebly, Squarespace. GoDaddy has a Build It Tonight type platform. I think just about any hosting company has their own, like, what you see, what you get editor to build a website. So there's literally thousands of choices out there. Here's what you want to consider when trying to figure out which one's going to work for you. All of these platforms take no coding information. Like, you don't have to understand coding in order to create a site there. They're all on a what-you-see-what-you-get builder type So they, they'll have like click and drag elements. They'll have templates that are set and you just, you know, fill your information, swap out theirs, put yours in. When you're looking at any of these different systems, you want to look at everything they offer that your business is going to use, and you want to make sure that it offers what your business needs. What that means, do you need a secure website form that actually takes personal information? If you do, that's not a basic website form. You want to make sure that the platform offers a solution for a secure website form. So what that would be, if you're asking for credit card information, anything personal like Social Security number, just, you know, anything like that. If you're going to offer products for sale that you want to actually physically sell, make sure that the system offers a shopping cart. Is that shopping cart adequate for what you need? Are you doing virtual downloads instead of actually shipping a product? You know, does it offer that virtual download. All of these little pieces actually matter. And the reason I say that is, and I've seen this literally over the last 15 years, hundreds of times where someone will start on a platform because they love how it looked, but when they get into the nitty-gritty of how it works and what it can and can't do, they get frustrated because it may not be able to do exactly what you want it to do. And that's when they call someone like me that's gonna have to go in and actually code something to get it to work right. And you don't want that. You don't want to be put in the position where you have to hire someone that knows code in order to run your website, because then you're trapped to that person forever. And when that person disappears, and let me tell you, in my industry this happens a lot, I get a lot of customers this way. Whoever they were working for is no longer reachable. They won't answer their phone, they won't answer their emails, they just disappeared. And they hold the key to their website. And it's like, what do I do? And a lot of times, depending on how many keys they hold, um, you have to start over. You don't want that, so you want to avoid that at all costs. When you're looking at the templates, which is like the style of what it looks like, most of these website companies offer a variety of different templates, and you want to make sure that you pick one that has a template— I want— I hate to use this word, but exactly what you want, because then you can just take that picture out, put your picture in, take out this block of text, put your block of text in, and it's fairly simple and straightforward. But what usually happens is that you want something very similar to this but slightly different. You want it to act in a slightly different way. And when you go in and try to make that template do that slightly different thing, that's when frustration again sets in and you can't do it because you're locked out. In a lot of these systems, you're actually locked out from, from manipulating the code at all, which means you can't even hire someone like me to do this for you because I'm locked out just like you are. So that's the drawback to the what-you-see-what-you-get type editors within this realm of building a website. A few other drawbacks: some of them won't let you put in SEO, which is search engine optimization. They, they won't let you tweak things behind the scenes to get better rankings within the search engines. And again, a lot of times I get customers that have completely built websites in this, but they're not ranking well, and they want to hire a company to go in and help them rank well. Well, a lot of times the answer is simply you need a different platform that's not as restrictive as the one that you chose. So choosing a platform is critical. Um, I personally use WordPress. The reason for that is that it is an open source platform, and what that means is not restricted by any one company. There are tons of plugins that you can either use for free or you purchase, and there's a lot of good reasons to purchase plugins. That you can add to your site. A plugin does one thing, and that is, like, a contact form plugin only runs your contact form. You can have, you know, a slider plugin if you want to have images rotating on your website, and you— it only does that one thing. So if there's something that you want to add to your site later on because you— maybe your business is expanding it's growing in one, one way or another and you want to add a feature, and if the platform you chose doesn't offer that feature, then either you can't add it or again you're starting over with a platform that does. And none of these platforms are interchangeable. So if you start with Wix and you want to go to Weebly, you're starting over. You can't just import the information. Which again is a big cost. So this really is a huge decision. Um, another reason that I use WordPress is because it's supported worldwide. There's a lot of really brilliant people working on different things. So as an example, let's say as you move forward in your business, you want to create a membership for something. Some aspect of your business is going to be a membership. WordPress has several membership plugins that you can use based on different things you want to do. Some of the other platforms may not even offer a membership plugin. So, you know, a membership is used in different ways. It may not even be a membership like you might be thinking. Like, I have a— for— it's a Lions Club that wants to add a membership to their site. And it's not because of wanting to do a membership in a traditional way, but they want their members to be able to access, you know, the roster and the committee reports and things that are needing to be kept private from the internet. A membership plugin puts a wall and it says, okay, everything on this side of the wall is public and is indexed in the search engines and can be found by anybody. Anything over here is 100% private. It's never gonna be indexed in search engines. You have to have a username and password to access this information. And the membership plugin also creates those username and passwords, and it gives the control of that to the member. When they lose their password, they, you know, use the little tool and it resets their password for them instead of them contacting you and having you manually do it. So there's a lot of reasons for something like that. In WordPress, it's super simple to add. Does it cost money? Yes. Is there a time involved in creating the whole thing? Yes. But you're not having to switch platforms. So that in itself is a huge reason to use WordPress. Um, and there's a ton of other reasons, but really this whole section is to get you thinking about what it is that you want on your website. What kind of functionalities do you want it to you to be able to have and to do for your customers? You know, what is it that your customers are needing to find? Does it need to be private? Does it need to be public? You know, there's just a ton of different scenarios that you could be using different things. Whatever platform you choose, make sure it's expandable and that it offers what you need right now.