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