Any experience with Site Build It?

[murph]

Guys,
I am looking at my own site which I currently have using Wordpress. However, I am not a tecchie and I have seen the Site Build It offer and was wondering if anyone here has had any experience of it? Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

[angienewton]

I have heard both positive and negative things but I don't have personal experience. Wordpress does everything you need so you don't NEED SBI. I personally use XSitePro which is similar but it's only a one time payment for the software not recurring. SBI also has some training but I'm not sure how current it is so I'm definitely not the one to ask.

Hopefully others here can help.

[murph]

Thanks, Angie for quick response. Will wait and see what others have to say.

[Phil Tanny]

Perhaps you can help us help you by sharing more about why you're shopping for a site builder/host. What are you hoping to find?

[murph]

The reason I was attracted to Site Build It is that it seems to offer a lot of support in terms of design, layout and driving traffic. I appreciate that wordpress offer a good product but does not offer the additional support. That is really my primary reason. That help to understand my thinking?

[Moneycatchers]

Hey Murph

Just saying Hello as I'm around the corner from you well the south of uk.

Sorry I don't use either I'm a wordpress person at the present.

Ian

[murph]

Thanks, Ian, and good to hear from you

[jgant]

I moved from Site Build It to WordPress. The following are based on my experiences:


Site Build It has a fantastic batch of tutorials and good tips on SEO and driving traffic.

SBI's template selection disappointed me a lot (it may be better now, but I suspect there's far more WordPress design options in the form of themes).

With SBI you have to pay for each website whereas with WordPress you can get an unlimited website hosting account and pay a small monthly fee.

SBI's blogging platform is terrible (at least when I used it). I actually got into WordPress because I integrated a WordPress blog into my SBI site. Then I figured why pay the high SBI cost when I can pay nothing for WP except for hosting.

It's much faster and easier to add content to a WordPress site than an SBI site. In fact, adding a page in SBI is tedious and slow. In WP, as you know, you simply click "Publish".

If
you want to build a customized design in SBI, you'll need to know coding as well (i.e. html and CSS).

The only reason I would recommend SBI is for the education and not the website building platform. SBI is popular because they were one of the first options that enabled people to build websites without knowing any coding. However, they've fallen behind the times with respect to design and ease-of-use.

[murph]

That's a really helpful response, thank you. Two questions, did SBI help a lot with driving traffic? and, is it possible to integrate a wordpress blog into an SBI site?

[Phil Tanny]

Hi again Murph,


The reason I was attracted to Site Build It is that it seems to offer a lot of support in terms of design, layout and driving traffic.

Ok, thanks for that.

I haven't been to SBI in a couple years, so my understandings are limited, and probably out of date.

They used to (and probably still do) have a quite active and supportive forum community, which might interest you. You could get the same education here. You'd probably meet more people there.

What's good, and bad, about SBI is it takes you step by step through the process of building pages carefully. It's very thorough, but also very tedious, as I remember it. When I looked at it, the manual was about 50,000 pages long, :) or so it seemed. Lots and lots of repetition. It's a teaching style that works well for some, and drives others up the wall.

Lynn does a better job of getting to the point, imho.

This is just an opinion, and not a very popular one, but I wouldn't worry too much about graphic design. Give yourself an hour to pick out a design, and then put that decision behind you. It's completely normal for webmasters, especially new ones, to agonize endlessly over how their site looks. Skip this step if you can.

Themes, designs, plug-ins, fancy gizmos, special features, add-on this and that, and so on, save it all for later. There's a giant industry out there that wants to suck you in to worrying about all this stuff, tune them out for now. Don't worry, they'll all be there later if you still want them.

Point being, there's so much to learn and do, you don't want to bite off anything that isn't really necessary in the beginning.

Focus on...

Building an audience is a very important issue, and you're right to be focused on that.

With that in mind, here's two things I suggest you do worry about, right from the beginning.

CONTENT: No matter what niche you enter, there will be lots of competitors already producing vast oceans of mediocre content. You don't want to be just the latest little invisible fish in this ocean, or every step of the way will be a struggle.

Here's an exercise that might help you explore the right frame of mind.

Pretend you're a writer at the New York Times. A real writer. A pro.

Pretend that somebody else is going to run the website, choose the marketing strategy, sell the ad space, and all of that. That's not your department.

Pretend all you do is write, and your career will soar or sink based on the quality of the words you write. Print your words out on a blank sheet of paper, pass the paper around, and see if your words stand up on their own.

That mindset is a good foundation for a successful site. You want readers to be enthusiastic about your site, and tell their friends, that is, be part of your marketing team.

LINKS: Before you do the first thing, before you invest any more time in to this go look in the mirror, and ask yourself whether you're willing to spend hours every day finding links to your site. You're going to need lots and lots of links.

It can be quite tedious work sometimes, and thus most webmasters don't work at it very hard. And thus they wind up with pretty sites with little traffic and income. I've done this a number of times myself, and I promise you it doesn't work.

If you're serious about quality content, and you can learn to love links, you'll build an audience, and a business.

You can do this with pretty much any site builder.

Best of luck!

Phil

[jgant]

Yes, you can integrate a WordPress blog into an SBI site. It takes a little figuring out, but you can do it. I did it and that's how I discovered WordPress.

Other than the vast amount of information SBI offers, I'm also constantly impressed with the search engine rankings of SBI sites. I know what they look like; they are easy to spot. In many niches, SBI sites rank well. SBI teaches you about SEO - both onsite and offsite. They also teach about building backlinks.

The info from SBI is solid, but you can learn much of it elsewhere such as Lynn's blog of which I'm a regular reader.

I respectfully partly disagree with Bookkeeper-For-You's suggestion that design isn't terribly important. The part I agree with is don't agonize endlessly over design. Choose a design and go with it - don't spend days and weeks tweaking design.

But, in my view, if SBI has not added new designs in the last year to 18 months, then I can say that I don't like their designs at all. Sure, website design is not the be all and end all, but having a contemporary looking website is important in my view. SBI designs are outdated and I believe this affects conversion to some extent. WordPress themes and Joomla templates are far more up-to-date.

That said, content is the most important element of a website. SBI repeatedly teaches this.

So, if you're prepared to write great content and do backlinking (tedious, but necessary), then you're in a position to create a successful website.

[murph]

Phil, this is great stuff from you, so thank you for that. Just 2 questions from your response - one is that my perception is that Site Build It helps to drive traffic to your site. Is that correct or a misunderstanding on my part? The second question is about links - I am pretty poor about links, so is there an article or report that you could recommend that would give me the important dos and donts about links? Sorry for being a nuisance but the quality of your response just helped to raise more questions in me!

[Phil Tanny]

Phil, this is great stuff from you, so thank you for that.

You're welcome sir, glad to be of service.


Just 2 questions from your response - one is that my perception is that Site Build It helps to drive traffic to your site. Is that correct or a misunderstanding on my part?

Again, I haven't looked at SBI in a few years, but my understandings are as follows.

SBI teaches you how to do keyword research, and how to optimize your pages for these keywords. It's not the software specifically that builds the traffic, but the instruction that is built-in to the system.

You can get that same instruction here on this forum, and quite a number of other places. If my memory is correct, you can also get the SBI manual containing this instruction for free.

Point being, it's not the software that builds the traffic, but information, and what you do with it. I wouldn't purchase SBI with the thought that once you have the program that you'll just push a button and somehow traffic will happen.

The original vision of SBI was to be a unified complete system that contained everything novice webmasters needed. That is, the publishing tools, and the instruction, bundled together in a single package. This was ground breaking at the time, as the vast majority of web hosts give you some server space, and that's it, you're on your own from there, and they make no attempt to teach you the business or help you succeed. Most web hosts hate the whole idea of having anything at all to do with you and your business strategy etc.

SBI's original vision is much less industry leading now, but it still could be a good choice for those who prefer an all-in-one type environment to picking and choosing tools from around the net. If you can get in to the SBI forum, that might be worth checking out. I forget if it's open to the public.

I'll soon be re-releasing my own site builder, so if you're not in a hurry, stay tuned for that. But, like SBI, Wordpress or any other sitebuilder, it won't magically generate traffic for you. What will build traffic for you is...

1) Lots of quality content
2) Keyword researched and optimized pages.
3) Lots of links

The key to lots of traffic isn't software, but content, keywords and links. Even that isn't quite right...

The real key to traffic is us. What is our relationship with our online business? It's not hard at all to learn the information about traffic, the challenge is in applying that info relentlessly and consistently over time, until we reach our goals.

As far as I know, there is no software in the world that can really address the key deciding factor, what's going on inside our heads. I say that with some regret, being a web software developer myself.

Lynn's personal coaching has a much better chance of positively affecting those things in us that really matter to the success of our business.


The second question is about links - I am pretty poor about links, so is there an article or report that you could recommend that would give me the important dos and donts about links?

I have a site coming about this too. It will contain a long list of link building tips, and more importantly, a system for keeping track of which tips we've actually completed.

But "coming soon" doesn't help you much now, so if you'd like to start a thread all about link building here, perhaps we can all pile in our favorite tips.

[murph]

Thanks, Phil, and keep me in mind when you have your site about links. I will start a new thread regarding links, so please look out for it and contribute. Thanks.

[Phil Tanny]

Ok Murph, will do. If you don't see me in the links thread after a few days, please feel free to remind me with a PM if you wish.

[robert adams]

1. google for free web templates
2. choose one you like and change it up to make it your own
3. learn about sales pages etc. from here and apply to your template
4. read up here about SEO and do what you learn here.
5. rinse and repeat

you have just done everything that SBI and /or XSitePro etc. will do for you

[angienewton]

Actally XSitePro has a lot more than what you mention above Robert (I'm not familiar with SBI but I think it does as well). It really just depends on what your goal is with your business as to whether you use a static site with software, static site/blog with Wordpress, etc. Everyone's business will be different.

[robert adams]

Actally XSitePro has a lot more than what you mention above Robert (I'm not familiar with SBI but I think it does as well). It really just depends on what your goal is with your business as to whether you use a static site with software, static site/blog with Wordpress, etc. Everyone's business will be different.

not really, xsitepro is just a web site creator with the other stuff I mentioned built into it. I am not really bashing either one, I just think they are overpriced for what you can get for free with a little time spent searching around and learning a bit for yourself.

robert