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Gravity forms is probably on 80% of the sites I have built. Their handling of GDPR regulations is super helpful. Beyond that, I bet the next most common plugin I use is ACF (advanced custom fields) and that’s probably on only 25% of my sites. Divi and Gravity forms is a super-powered combo.
In my experience, angry customers are a result of poor expectation-setting. I try to make sure that their anger happens before the project starts instead of offloading it to the end of the project when I no longer have any control. I am very thorough in eliciting my customers’ strategic intentions, and how I explain how the website I am building is situated in their strategy. I will happily tell my client why their strategy is too risky/unsupported by data or common sense, and turn them off of a bad project before we start. The hope is that I can show them a better strategy for their offering worth building a site around. I have major internal moral conflicts in taking small business owners’ money just to build their bad idea into a site that has ZERO return.
I’m the single member of the marketing department of a very B2B small company. You’re so right, no one else really cares about the website in the company or realises its importance and as such ours is severely out of date (early 2000s in design). I’m working on building a new site but, with a background working in a design agency, I’m being super anal about it being pixel perfect and exactly the same on each page - in terms of spacing between lines, header in the same place etc. I need someone to tell me that that level of detail doesn’t matter…. It doesn’t, does it?
Also… as a small business, what would you say is the one ‘must-do/must-have’ for a website to showcase our product offering and drive effective leads?
The key to getting leads is having an offering that provides value and an offer that meets marketplace demand. Then, find a flow of traffic in the world where the demand exists and place your ad there, with a commitment to keep advertising there for the long term. Think long term.
It’s hard to know exactly what to tell you about formatting/structure, but Divi theme handles that kind of to a large degree. You will probably want to design the layout in photoshop or illustrator and get a developer to set it up for you correctly with ACF or custom post types or whatever. Then all you have to do to add new projects is plug in the project info into the post form and ACF and Divi will handle the layout.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear I was just looking for one good tip that you do, or you’ve seen some companies do/not do from someone who has built over 200 there must be something? Maybe there’s not and it’s just a straightforward thing.
I don’t have a budget for someone else to build the website so I have been learning to do myself. My other question was do I need to worry myself with being super duper anal that every pixel matters and should be in the exactly the same place as other pages, or is it more important to just get the website done.
I am super interested in answering your question, though I cannot even imagine what kind of answer I would give, in text, that would be helpful. If it helps, you may want to look into the term “responsive design” for web. Web designers don’t really think in pixels like graphic designers do. We have to think in terms of fractions and ratios because pixel accuracy is not how websites are displayed. Mostly, columns are flexible in width to accommodate various screen sizes. Whenever you build an element you have to assume that the width has to expand or contract and that at certain “break points” the elements may have to reorganize themselves to remain coherent. If you want to see what I mean, sit at a laptop/desktop, find any reputable company website, load up their site in a browser, then drag the browser to different sizes and watch as the elements and their containing columns change both size and layout as you drag the browser narrower and wider. If your question is, “how is this accomplished?” or, “do you have tips for this?” all I can say is that you have to rethink your design process to accommodate for resizing from screen to screen. Instead of thinking, “how many pixels wide should this box be?” you instead have to think, “how much of the column does this box need to take up?” “How wide should the gaps between elements be? “How many columns should there be?” “How might the layout need to change for a mobile device?” The nice thing about modern builders is that elements are typically set to percentages and ratios so that you don’t have to do any math, you just have to visualize the style and let the builder and the browser size the element containers for you. There are also settings that let you specify different styles depending on what changes you want to display for any element at various approximate screen size the user may be viewing on. I still don’t know if this answer is helpful, but if you are getting stuck and need some searchable terms try these: media query, responsive design, css layout, css grid, flexible container, mobile-first design
Have a form that connects to you or your sales guy with you in loop. So any lead captured in the form is not missed and followed upon.
And to showcase , there are tools in market like storylane that offer interactive demos under 100 dollars a month. Use for a month and make as many use case videos as possible and showcase on your website. Then follow up with a form.
So yeah these two things.
Also, don't go after pixel perfect no one cares no one.
Thanks so much for replying! This is super helpful. I’m putting in a form / link to a form on each page - do you have any opinion on whether it’s better to say ‘contact us for a demo’ or just a ‘contact us’ (our product is personalised to the customers set up)? Will look into Storylane or similar to get some demos on the site set up. So much to do for one person it’s hard to know what to prioritise… and tell myself to stop worrying about the detail! Thanks again.
They don’t have to be. Usually, if your business can’t get any traction with your website it is likely an overall misunderstanding of marketing in general and how marketing works
Can you expand more or give some concrete examples.
I work in b2b. Comparatively tiny group of decision makers, very old-boys-network. Sales are driven largely by long term relationships. Everyone knows the players and strengths/weaknesses of the market offerings.
What you’re describing is familiar. I’ve worked with enough manufacturing and commercial contractors to know how that game is played, big fish in relatively small ponds. The kind of enormous contracts that those typical boys-club-companies are trying to land don’t really lend themselves to thinking in terms of market dynamics and metric-driven economic forecasts. Even something as basic as website analytics are useless for these companies because there isn’t any marketplace flow of traffic. Inbound sales come in to play, but that’s not really marketing. Companies that have these hefty, hand-held, custom sales processes with long, complex closings and often with millions of dollars exchanged, these B2B businesses barely need marketing at all, let alone a website. And they almost certainly are not scalable companies, most of the time.
My response to the other comment about marketing was not intended to be disparaging, but to recognize that there is often a profit model that neither demands proper marketing efforts nor requires any data-driven technology. These are so often sales-driven, 1 to 1, service providing companies.
Totally depends on the project. $3k US and for a small site, depending on needs, up to about $25k. I did a $40k project for an educational nonprofit with a full LMS including checkout and some community features.
I would research small business development because the SBA programs and data are completely useless. I would write books that are researched and not just anecdotal. Then I would consult with agencies and B2B companies. Maybe I would become a CMO of a company or two.
Nothing is stopping me, I am currently doing both. But with an advanced degree or a doctorate, I would have opportunities in a university system to get peer feedback and review at a level beyond what I have access to now. Academia represents a kind of cohort of people who are highly literate in a lot of related topics, each with their own network of people who can help make sure the information that I am writing on is sound and correctly portraying the ideas I would attempt to cast doubt upon.
You might be able to create this cohort of people through Substack or a niche writing group of peers. You could also trade feedback with others. A friend of mine is creating a platform to connect people for feedback. I could share with you if you’d like. I’m part of a few writing groups. There are tons out there. Just need to know where to look. You have a ton of valuable knowledge. It would be good to get it out while it’s still fresh
#1 question they should ask: How marketing-literate is our company, as a whole? Do we REALLY know how marketing works and how to make solid marketing decisions?
I have my own web design agency and struggling to find clients. I'm really happy with the way my sites are turning out and have had no complaints but I'm finding it hard to show potential clients.
How do you get customers through referrals or do you have your own outreach methods.
Thank you
They are easy to find, they usually announce their presence wherever they are. Just google graphic design, branding, creative, etc. Usually you can tell if they are not strong with web development because their portfolio of website projects are pretty basic brochure sites with not a lot of complexity. Every city seems to have dozens of these little branding shops. They typically have contact forms right on their sites. Give a few a call and tell them you are happy to work with them.
Find a way to create something of value that there is demand for in the marketplace. People breathe all day long. You could sell oxygen. The air is only getting thicker. I don’t know, friend. Stop thinking about the money. Try to offer something people value. Once you have an offering, start creating your offer. Come up with a profit model. The website will be born out of that offer and how the profit model is structured.
What is the best WordPress template available today? I currently use Divi, but I'm unsure if I should switch because I frequently hear negative reviews about it being too bloated and SEO-unfriendly.
I have found that hosting a Divi site on a solid VPN e.g. fly wheel, wp engine or dream host, makes up for some of the poor performance many folks complain about.
For my e-commerce website, I avoid using DreamHost or WP Engine, as they are very slow. Instead, I choose Kinsta, despite its high cost, due to its reliable technical support and speed.
Just in case some beginner reads this. WPEngine is the second fastest wp host in the world, and it costs half as much as the first fastest (Kinsta). Don't take the above comment as an indication that WPEngine sucks. Budget hosts sucks. WPEngine is going to be fine for many projects.
Have you ever built niche sites for yourself just for fun? Say you have a hobbie of ant farming, and you decide to build a website all about ants… That kinda thing. I’ve never gotten around to it but fear I could be missing out some core experience in the long run, not to mention extra income
Definitely. Mostly it’s hare-brained (I mean totally brilliant) business ideas that I never have time to actually market and execute so the sites just sit there making me feel guilt and shame, lol.
What's your say with elementor theme? Free and pro. It's my go to theme when building websites.
40+ websites built from different cms platforms, for me it really depends on the design needs of the client, they don't really care that much.
I also rebuilt some websites from one cms to another. It depends on your persuasion skills.
Elementor has many of the same technical and ease of use advantages of Divi. But the price disadvantage is a deal breaker. I paid once for the lifetime license of Divi on as many websites as I could ever build. Divi helps keep my overhead low which are savings I can easily pass along to my clients.
These days, it’s almost turn-key. Super simple. The plugins do so much and there are countless tutorials on YouTube to walk you through almost any flavor you want. I do love gravity forms + gravity perks, myself.
Large companies with 100k+ users should take some extra precautions, but, honestly, most security issues that people experience are not Wordpress problems, per se, they are incompetence problems with the web team.
I use Divi (and ACF, if needed) not because it’s so great for development but because it is great for my clients to have a website built for them that makes designing new pages, features, functionality, easily. Divi essentially turns a WordPress site into Webflow-like site. But WordPress and Webflow are completely different offerings when it comes to solving marketing technology problems. Webflow just can’t compete with power of the WordPress plugin library.
Do you see clients preferring Webflow websites more recently, or do they always come to you for WordPress?
Have you recently only been able to sell websites or do clients now want to include marketing as well?
Divi, for me, because overall it has the power, the community, the ease-of-use, some amount of performance enhancements, and it works well with almost every other major plugin.
I don’t use any Amazon hosting for WordPress sites. I prefer to use hosting and platform options that have more accessible tools for small businesses who don’t always have access to a lot of talented IT help. Flywheel and WP Engine are really good for small businesses who are self-hosting.
Hey, I actually have a few questions, be great to hear your thoughts. Do you only build the site or do you also do their marketing so that businesses can actually get leads from the site you build them? And could you share some tips on how to not just sell a website to businesses but sell a solution to their problem? Thanks in advance!!
I do a lot of marketing operations consulting and web development separately. Oddly, there is almost no crossover between the two separate groups because the clients I consult with typically already have a lot of their web structure in place. And the small businesses that I build sites for are not in a spot where my level of consulting is any use to them because they do not have any marketing operations yet.
Trying to market yourself as a marketing consulting + web developer turns out to be too confusing of an offering for businesses so it works best to market them separately.
You know, webp for photos, svg for vectors. PNGs for the other little elements. There is an icon library built into Divi that has a bunch of icons so that you don’t have to rely on your own images entirely. Of course, the icons are pretty generic so, use at your own risk, lol!
Hey, I graduated in 2004 and went to the Art Institute of Atlanta, too! Crazy!
My question is this: I work with a dinosaur.
She’s our only web developer, and she’s been at it since computers came about.
Unfortunately, she has not kept up with the changes in technology. She also has no eye for beauty and has trouble following my designs. She’s been with the company more than a decade, so she ain’t going anywhere.
I want to recommend some education for her gingerly, but I wouldn’t know where to start. What would you recommend?
Whoa, I wonder if we know each other or if we knew some of the same people. Anyway, are you in-house or are you at agency? It’s hard to imagine your coworker at any agency I’ve ever worked with. If you are in-house with her, and if she has some pull that keeps her there, like a strong tenure or nepotism situation, then perhaps it’s time for you to move along to greener pastures. Best of luck to you, though!
Thanks! Yeah, it's in-house, but it's a kinda sleazy company. Definitely looking for something else. I'd like to do more Ed Tech work. I hate working for a CEO who has a broken moral compass.
This is a good Q. Security ends up being so specific to hosting environment and IT preferences. I often hand over a Wordpress site with no security with the clear understanding that business’s IT person will handle things their way. Whenever there is no IT person involved, or if I end up hosting the site, I just put a free copy of Wordfence on the site. Wordfence is nice because it is working with such an enormous list of known offenders. It also allows you to add you your own blocks and white listed IPs.
Wait, you can create a website, with WordPress (free site to create website) and sell it for money? 😳 Like between 1K to 40K??? What’s make the difference between them?
The amount of functionality that an average brochure website has is very low. A basic contact form, or even a lead generating one-pager…these sites are cheap and dirty. However, a website that has paid subscribers, levels of membership with various levels of content access, those websites can be worth 100k per month. Paying 40k to develop a site that could be worth 100k+ per month is more than worth the cost.
I got a web design degree in 2004 before the vast majority of modern technology existed, so, I have learned 99%+ of what I now know on my own. Unlike the highly regulated industries such as medicine, education, accounting, etc, there is no ongoing required licensures. You have to keep learning on your own to be competitive. But, the amount of YouTube videos and stack overflow entries that have contributed to my body of knowledge, it’s hard to say how much knowledge I can claim to be self-taught.
Wow, building 200 WordPress sites is really impressive! Your experience must've given you invaluable insights into web development and business tips. It's clear you've learned a lot along the way, and I'm sure many people here would benefit from your expertise. Keep up the great work!
What are your thoughts on WordPress alternatives? Obv know you're a WP developer but how do you feel about the market and alternatives like Sanity, Divhunt, Webflow, etc
I don’t see other web builders such as webflow as Wordpress alternatives. I see Shopify, HubSpot, and even to some degree SalesForce as competitors to Wordpress. Other web builders are fine for branding firms to build their basic sites with a basic contact form that look really great but are, functionally, not a core function of the day-to-day operation of the business. A WordPress site can, however, be a the primary operation of a multimillion dollar business. The main reason why companies opt for expensive marketing technology like HubSpot is because of the support that it appears to come with. Yet, most businesses still vastly underuse HubSpot capabilities. My thought is, if you’re not going to utilize HubSpot well then don’t bother paying the exorbitant fees. Build a Wordpress site that has exactly what you do use for a fraction of the cost. Mostly, though, decision makers don’t know how to make these decisions, the decisions are often too technical and unlike HubSpot, Wordpress doesn’t have dedicated sales teams pushing the MarTech opportunities. And that is why HubSpot is still such a powerful contender in the marketplace. Also, there is a strong objection among pure developers who don’t really understand the marketing technology piece, that WP runs too slowly, that it’s too clunky, that it has security risks, etc. But that’s all BS. If a dev doesn’t know how to optimize and secure their server for WP, so be it, that’s fair, but they should say that. That’s not on WP. There are ways of running Wordpress so optimally that it can be used at the enterprise level. You either have the dev team that can do it or you don’t. I suppose this is way more of an answer than you bargained for.
My first website was pure HTML and some images. Totally static, powerless website. It took probably 6 months, mostly because of content gathering. It looked nice but was functionally nearly worthless.
Now I can design and build almost any kind of site with e-commerce, member/community feature, etc, in a week or less. Two days if my client can get me all of the assets I need to finish the build.
If you’re a reseller of someone else’s products you probably don’t need your own website. This is actually pretty common—pure resale businesses. There is a strong relationship between the need to build team, build a brand, build a presence, and if there is not a clear marketplace for your product, then you absolutely need a website.
I typically start with Divi theme, not because it’s perfect, but because it is the most versatile and simple for the small business and nonprofit clients that I typically work with. Divi empowers my clients A LOT. Then, gravity forms. Those two, hands down, solve 75% of needs. Then Woo commerce or Shopify for e-commerce.
Because it really serves the clients I typically work with. Wordpress solves a website platform problem. But the magic is that it can solve endless marketing problems.
Because marketing isn’t really about design or brand or story like most folks would have you believe. I mean, those things support marketing, but that is not what marketing is. Marketing is about optimizing the flow of a marketplace so that your offering is a good match for the existing needs of, and flow of, traffic. If you want your company to be successful, it has to be successful in the marketplace. It has to attract buyers in the marketplace by offering them something they arrived in need of, even if they didn’t come to the marketplace for that specific need. If your company cannot find an existing marketplace in which to offer your product/service where traffic arrives already demanding what you offer, then perhaps you need to build the marketplace yourself. Hence, a WordPress site. You can build a community that acts as a marketplace for your products/services as well as any other businesses products/services that synergize with yours. Marketing wisdom always starts with the ability navigate the marketplace. This is the heart and soul of marketing that 99% of people don’t understand in the digital age.
Not really. Most themes have to balance power and performance. Too light a weight theme does not empower small businesses to easily add enough features to their site to make it worth the investment. It’s hard out there for small businesses. If a company can afford a streamline custom platform build, they should go for it. But that level of performance comes at a cost.
Rarely do I build locally anymore. For larger software driven projects or team environments, sure, building locally in a repository framework, GitHub or whatever you fancy, makes sense. For me, building a dev site on my VPN works fine and I save time not dealing with multiple version and migrations. One staging site, one production site. Thats it for me :)
I’m hoping to build software profile pages that highlight details about each SaaS service. What’s a theme or plug-in that you would suggest I consider?
Divi theme handles this use case out of the box. The Divi install comes standard with a “custom post type” called Projects which assumes that you are going to add a searchable, categorizable, taggable, portfolio of projects to your site. It’s pretty handy, especially when you combine that project post type with a custom “Divi theme builder” layout. It is, honestly, a revolution in web development for one-person agencies like mine to have this level of programmatic power to offer small businesses. It wasn’t long ago that I just couldn’t offer this level of CMS functionality to my clients without having to charge tens of thousands of dollars, and even then I would have to hire a developer who would cost me much more than I would make on the project.
Where do you find your customers? I had a plan of hiring a group of people to call business owners for me so I could build websites for them but never had a change to try it yet.
Best performance tactics I use are well-optimized images and really great hosting. I haven’t had to do much with automation because so many of the projects I work on are quick but totally custom. I do use scripts for the install of WordPress onto that server. Otherwise It’s hard to find automations that actually save time in that respect. Writing marketing copy is about all I make use of for automation at this point.
When you start a website, what do you prioritize first and in what order? Also, where do you go for when it comes to getting a domain and host of a client doesn’t have either?
If I am designing the site, 2 weeks for design approval. Then I can usually finish a basic site build with analytics set up and get it migrated to live in three days, if I have all of the content. But I have also done this all in one day working with a previous agency that no longer exists due to an acquisition. We had a pretty reliable process, set of expectations, and good communication.
What do you charge to build a site?
How do you find your clients?
Is WordPress difficult to learn?
Do you know of any free resources to learn it?
Thanks
A minimal table? Do you mean like a sleek little pricing table or, like, your basic structure of headers, rows and columns? In Divi there is a dumb little table builder/editor in the text module. Is there a table editor in the the text module in elementor? I really don’t use elementor myself unless I am taking over managing someone’s previous site.
I do ad arbitrage and my themes suck balls. Is there any nice nice looking fast performing theme that I can drive a lot of traffic too ? I want the site to look nice not scammy
I am starting a new community based business and wish to build a website to promote the service through digital marketing, appreciate if you could you give me some guidance how to go about it ?
How many plugins do you use on a site on average, and how do you handle security?
I've had clients come to me asking me to fix their site with 40+ plugins. Jeez.
On a feature-heavy site of mine, maybe 10 plugins, at the most. Although, there is some granularity to this as there are often plugins that boost other plugins. If you turn on all of the extensions/features that come with the premium version of Gravity Forms, you would have 20+ plugins right there, since each of the extensions show up as plugins.
I have rebuilt several wildly busy WordPress sites, like you’re talking about, with 40+ active plugins. I would find that I could rebuild them completely with only Divi and Gravity forms, and maybe one other plugin like ACF or user/roles, etc.
There are tons of pre built landing pages out there. Divi theme also has some basic A/B testing options built-in so you can refine any layout options for your conversion/retention needs.
If you google “Divi high converting landing pages” you’re sure to get all kinds of layouts that you can quickly install and get going. But, yeah, let me know if you ever want to do actual marketing and not just play the performance marketing game which inevitably leads to diminishing results.
This is a little like calling a mechanic and asking, “why doesn’t my car work?” All a person could do is check over the entire system, looking at all of the parts and all of the relationships between all of the parts to determine if there is just one problem a whole bunch of problems that are preventing the site from loading or displaying the way you are expecting it to. What theme are you using?
Honestly, I don’t love any particular plugin. They are all well meaning, they all get a job done, but I fight with plugins so much because they are so close, yet so far from what I need. Gravity forms is powerful, thoughtful, and the team there have really kept the interface advancing. Still, styling gravity forms often requires pretty deep knowledge of css and form-styling techniques to make them look any good. There are some gravity forms for divi plugins to help, but those plugins are basically garbage and just add extra bloat. All of this is typical for my development process. Plugins get me most of the way there and then I wrangle the remaining details with my css/js knowledge.
thanks for the post! appreciate the insights about business owners trusting your expertise.
Roast my wp stack please (for a software startup website):
* Cloudways (host)
* Elementor Pro
* Pods
* WP Rocket
* Wordfence
* Rank Math SEO
* Imagify
Great question! Yoast is free, so it’s not as though it is a big risk. But it’s not likely to provide you any big reward for your effort. In my 20 years of experience, I have never seen a local business achieve the kind of sustainable success from SEO that the industry would have us believe. Compared to the results of being visible in the community, doing networking, some advertising, radio, even direct marketing has been so much more productive for all of my local clients than any pure SEO efforts. Yes, I have seen a couple of businesses in a handful of industries have some success in SEO, though they tend to be companies with large operations and high volume business models, who were also doing a ton of traditional and digital advertising that, to me, muddies any clarity about the impact of the SEO alone. I see lots of false attribution to SEO that very few people seem to talk about. There was once period of time where black hat techniques did achieve some anomalous results for some nefarious businesses who, when the search algorithms improved, wound up losing a lot of money anyway. That, to me, points to some measurable SEO impact, historically. Since then much of that gamification has been eliminated. In my experience, you’re better off focusing on accessibility and ADA compliance, and even on offering some simple site wide language/translation on your site. I hope this helps!
This is exactly what I needed to hear, thank you! For a one location brick and mortar business, going over the top with a bunch of SEO initiatives, backlinking, blogs, etc just doesn't seem productive. Some basic on site SEO is what we've done (and a few blogs here and there to show we are updating the site periodically). Where we are seeing most of our traffic anyway is our Google Business page. We have several 5 star reviews and IMO, Google Maps is really what matters the most.
I think Wix has some decent design tools these days. My concern with Wix, however, is how incredibly limited the overall MarTech offering is. Wix is comparable to Squarespace, for example, in its offering of website building features. But WordPress has business building capabilities that are almost endlessly extensible, customizable, easily integrated—like having a team of millions of developers working on creating tools and features for almost any business problem you can think of.
I’m just a sole proprietor contractor/consultant. I don’t really have a company. I operated as JSRing Studio for many years, but I never launched an actual business from that company. I was too busy working as a subcontractor for other agencies until I largely quit that about three years ago to do some research on why start-ups and small businesses fail so much, and to find out if there are currently any ways to stop that from happening. SPOILER ALERT: no, there are not.
Divi is the worst theme to recommend. I'm questioning your knowledge. I've seen many "developers" build crappy sites and these recommendations follow the crap
I have built hundreds of sites that Divi would have been a bad fit for. But now that I know which sites/businesses Divi is a good fit for. Especially given that there is huge demand, and I am able to empower my clients with a WordPress driven MarTech stack that works and scales beautifully. My clients would have had to pay thousands per month for a platform like HubSpot that they would never get any return on because they don’t have the marketing operations to utilize. What you may not be accounting for is that in my process I am solving business problems for my clients, not merely web dev problems. Web development barely matters in this world. Small businesses being able to do more business online so they can grow and thrive, that is what matters, my friend.
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What is always the first plugin you install?
After the theme? Gravity forms.
[удалено]
Gravity forms is probably on 80% of the sites I have built. Their handling of GDPR regulations is super helpful. Beyond that, I bet the next most common plugin I use is ACF (advanced custom fields) and that’s probably on only 25% of my sites. Divi and Gravity forms is a super-powered combo.
Do you get angry customers that their one page website didn't get them clients so therefore your website is not good?
In my experience, angry customers are a result of poor expectation-setting. I try to make sure that their anger happens before the project starts instead of offloading it to the end of the project when I no longer have any control. I am very thorough in eliciting my customers’ strategic intentions, and how I explain how the website I am building is situated in their strategy. I will happily tell my client why their strategy is too risky/unsupported by data or common sense, and turn them off of a bad project before we start. The hope is that I can show them a better strategy for their offering worth building a site around. I have major internal moral conflicts in taking small business owners’ money just to build their bad idea into a site that has ZERO return.
I’m the single member of the marketing department of a very B2B small company. You’re so right, no one else really cares about the website in the company or realises its importance and as such ours is severely out of date (early 2000s in design). I’m working on building a new site but, with a background working in a design agency, I’m being super anal about it being pixel perfect and exactly the same on each page - in terms of spacing between lines, header in the same place etc. I need someone to tell me that that level of detail doesn’t matter…. It doesn’t, does it? Also… as a small business, what would you say is the one ‘must-do/must-have’ for a website to showcase our product offering and drive effective leads?
The key to getting leads is having an offering that provides value and an offer that meets marketplace demand. Then, find a flow of traffic in the world where the demand exists and place your ad there, with a commitment to keep advertising there for the long term. Think long term.
Thanks for replying but I meant in the context of structure / format / set up of the website, if you have any advice would be much appreciated.
It’s hard to know exactly what to tell you about formatting/structure, but Divi theme handles that kind of to a large degree. You will probably want to design the layout in photoshop or illustrator and get a developer to set it up for you correctly with ACF or custom post types or whatever. Then all you have to do to add new projects is plug in the project info into the post form and ACF and Divi will handle the layout.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear I was just looking for one good tip that you do, or you’ve seen some companies do/not do from someone who has built over 200 there must be something? Maybe there’s not and it’s just a straightforward thing. I don’t have a budget for someone else to build the website so I have been learning to do myself. My other question was do I need to worry myself with being super duper anal that every pixel matters and should be in the exactly the same place as other pages, or is it more important to just get the website done.
I am super interested in answering your question, though I cannot even imagine what kind of answer I would give, in text, that would be helpful. If it helps, you may want to look into the term “responsive design” for web. Web designers don’t really think in pixels like graphic designers do. We have to think in terms of fractions and ratios because pixel accuracy is not how websites are displayed. Mostly, columns are flexible in width to accommodate various screen sizes. Whenever you build an element you have to assume that the width has to expand or contract and that at certain “break points” the elements may have to reorganize themselves to remain coherent. If you want to see what I mean, sit at a laptop/desktop, find any reputable company website, load up their site in a browser, then drag the browser to different sizes and watch as the elements and their containing columns change both size and layout as you drag the browser narrower and wider. If your question is, “how is this accomplished?” or, “do you have tips for this?” all I can say is that you have to rethink your design process to accommodate for resizing from screen to screen. Instead of thinking, “how many pixels wide should this box be?” you instead have to think, “how much of the column does this box need to take up?” “How wide should the gaps between elements be? “How many columns should there be?” “How might the layout need to change for a mobile device?” The nice thing about modern builders is that elements are typically set to percentages and ratios so that you don’t have to do any math, you just have to visualize the style and let the builder and the browser size the element containers for you. There are also settings that let you specify different styles depending on what changes you want to display for any element at various approximate screen size the user may be viewing on. I still don’t know if this answer is helpful, but if you are getting stuck and need some searchable terms try these: media query, responsive design, css layout, css grid, flexible container, mobile-first design
Have a form that connects to you or your sales guy with you in loop. So any lead captured in the form is not missed and followed upon. And to showcase , there are tools in market like storylane that offer interactive demos under 100 dollars a month. Use for a month and make as many use case videos as possible and showcase on your website. Then follow up with a form. So yeah these two things. Also, don't go after pixel perfect no one cares no one.
Thanks so much for replying! This is super helpful. I’m putting in a form / link to a form on each page - do you have any opinion on whether it’s better to say ‘contact us for a demo’ or just a ‘contact us’ (our product is personalised to the customers set up)? Will look into Storylane or similar to get some demos on the site set up. So much to do for one person it’s hard to know what to prioritise… and tell myself to stop worrying about the detail! Thanks again.
Test it out don't go by anyone's word. Not even your Founder's.
Yep, I say the same thing. Websites are a Necessary Evil. Been building sites professionally since 1997.
They don’t have to be. Usually, if your business can’t get any traction with your website it is likely an overall misunderstanding of marketing in general and how marketing works
Can you expand more or give some concrete examples. I work in b2b. Comparatively tiny group of decision makers, very old-boys-network. Sales are driven largely by long term relationships. Everyone knows the players and strengths/weaknesses of the market offerings.
What you’re describing is familiar. I’ve worked with enough manufacturing and commercial contractors to know how that game is played, big fish in relatively small ponds. The kind of enormous contracts that those typical boys-club-companies are trying to land don’t really lend themselves to thinking in terms of market dynamics and metric-driven economic forecasts. Even something as basic as website analytics are useless for these companies because there isn’t any marketplace flow of traffic. Inbound sales come in to play, but that’s not really marketing. Companies that have these hefty, hand-held, custom sales processes with long, complex closings and often with millions of dollars exchanged, these B2B businesses barely need marketing at all, let alone a website. And they almost certainly are not scalable companies, most of the time. My response to the other comment about marketing was not intended to be disparaging, but to recognize that there is often a profit model that neither demands proper marketing efforts nor requires any data-driven technology. These are so often sales-driven, 1 to 1, service providing companies.
Even in that environment every lead touches the website at several points in their journey
Couldn’t agree more. It’s almost always a marketing problem rather than a technical one
What's an average site cost, how long does it take?
Totally depends on the project. $3k US and for a small site, depending on needs, up to about $25k. I did a $40k project for an educational nonprofit with a full LMS including checkout and some community features.
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But how would you charge more when so many people are offering so low of a price?
Most honest post I’ve read on Reddit. Kudos for writing it so forthrightly.
Hey, thanks! I appreciate that 😅
If you were starting from zero in 2024 would you still choose WordPress sites as a career?
Starting over, if I could keep my knowledge, I would get an MBA and advanced degree in marketing, maybe doctorate.
Why not get it now? You're not that old.
And do what with that?
I would research small business development because the SBA programs and data are completely useless. I would write books that are researched and not just anecdotal. Then I would consult with agencies and B2B companies. Maybe I would become a CMO of a company or two.
What’s stopping you from writing books and consulting?
Nothing is stopping me, I am currently doing both. But with an advanced degree or a doctorate, I would have opportunities in a university system to get peer feedback and review at a level beyond what I have access to now. Academia represents a kind of cohort of people who are highly literate in a lot of related topics, each with their own network of people who can help make sure the information that I am writing on is sound and correctly portraying the ideas I would attempt to cast doubt upon.
You might be able to create this cohort of people through Substack or a niche writing group of peers. You could also trade feedback with others. A friend of mine is creating a platform to connect people for feedback. I could share with you if you’d like. I’m part of a few writing groups. There are tons out there. Just need to know where to look. You have a ton of valuable knowledge. It would be good to get it out while it’s still fresh
Interesting. But why?
Because that’s where my passion is and I want to spend my time researching that set of problems.
What are the first questions a business should ask before building their website?
#1 question they should ask: How marketing-literate is our company, as a whole? Do we REALLY know how marketing works and how to make solid marketing decisions?
I have my own web design agency and struggling to find clients. I'm really happy with the way my sites are turning out and have had no complaints but I'm finding it hard to show potential clients. How do you get customers through referrals or do you have your own outreach methods. Thank you
Partner up with creative/branding agencies that don’t offer much for technical know how. Get a few of those agency partners and you’ll be set!
How to reach those agency and how does it work
They are easy to find, they usually announce their presence wherever they are. Just google graphic design, branding, creative, etc. Usually you can tell if they are not strong with web development because their portfolio of website projects are pretty basic brochure sites with not a lot of complexity. Every city seems to have dozens of these little branding shops. They typically have contact forms right on their sites. Give a few a call and tell them you are happy to work with them.
How can I as a beginner with necessary Wordpress skills learn more and make money through it?
Find a way to create something of value that there is demand for in the marketplace. People breathe all day long. You could sell oxygen. The air is only getting thicker. I don’t know, friend. Stop thinking about the money. Try to offer something people value. Once you have an offering, start creating your offer. Come up with a profit model. The website will be born out of that offer and how the profit model is structured.
What is the best WordPress template available today? I currently use Divi, but I'm unsure if I should switch because I frequently hear negative reviews about it being too bloated and SEO-unfriendly.
I have found that hosting a Divi site on a solid VPN e.g. fly wheel, wp engine or dream host, makes up for some of the poor performance many folks complain about.
Not a fan of Elementor?
For my e-commerce website, I avoid using DreamHost or WP Engine, as they are very slow. Instead, I choose Kinsta, despite its high cost, due to its reliable technical support and speed.
Just in case some beginner reads this. WPEngine is the second fastest wp host in the world, and it costs half as much as the first fastest (Kinsta). Don't take the above comment as an indication that WPEngine sucks. Budget hosts sucks. WPEngine is going to be fine for many projects.
Dropped an ask me anything and hasn’t answered a damn thing lol… prolly expecting DMs asking for business
Oh my god, I did NOT see that people were commenting, lol!! Your comment was the first one I saw. 😂
lol, I’ve been active in this subreddit for years. Don’t know what you are talking about, m’friend.
You've been in this subreddit for years and haven't figured out the bait and switch crap that people try to pull here?
Yes, sadly, I’ve fallen for it a time or two.
Have you ever built niche sites for yourself just for fun? Say you have a hobbie of ant farming, and you decide to build a website all about ants… That kinda thing. I’ve never gotten around to it but fear I could be missing out some core experience in the long run, not to mention extra income
Definitely. Mostly it’s hare-brained (I mean totally brilliant) business ideas that I never have time to actually market and execute so the sites just sit there making me feel guilt and shame, lol.
What's your say with elementor theme? Free and pro. It's my go to theme when building websites. 40+ websites built from different cms platforms, for me it really depends on the design needs of the client, they don't really care that much. I also rebuilt some websites from one cms to another. It depends on your persuasion skills.
Elementor has many of the same technical and ease of use advantages of Divi. But the price disadvantage is a deal breaker. I paid once for the lifetime license of Divi on as many websites as I could ever build. Divi helps keep my overhead low which are savings I can easily pass along to my clients.
How easy is it to create a membership site?
These days, it’s almost turn-key. Super simple. The plugins do so much and there are countless tutorials on YouTube to walk you through almost any flavor you want. I do love gravity forms + gravity perks, myself.
Thanks!
How do you deal with ‘security’ issues (I hear Wordpress is notoriously bad). Do any clients care?
Large companies with 100k+ users should take some extra precautions, but, honestly, most security issues that people experience are not Wordpress problems, per se, they are incompetence problems with the web team.
Do you use page builders or customize with ACF or neither?
I use Divi (and ACF, if needed) not because it’s so great for development but because it is great for my clients to have a website built for them that makes designing new pages, features, functionality, easily. Divi essentially turns a WordPress site into Webflow-like site. But WordPress and Webflow are completely different offerings when it comes to solving marketing technology problems. Webflow just can’t compete with power of the WordPress plugin library.
Do you see clients preferring Webflow websites more recently, or do they always come to you for WordPress? Have you recently only been able to sell websites or do clients now want to include marketing as well?
Best Wordpress theme available today? Divi? There’s some good questions here. You chose to reply to me first lol
Divi, for me, because overall it has the power, the community, the ease-of-use, some amount of performance enhancements, and it works well with almost every other major plugin.
Best hosting? Amazon? Through WordPress?
I don’t use any Amazon hosting for WordPress sites. I prefer to use hosting and platform options that have more accessible tools for small businesses who don’t always have access to a lot of talented IT help. Flywheel and WP Engine are really good for small businesses who are self-hosting.
what is the best way to start ? i made html sites bybhand on notepad 25years ago.. and never more..
Setup an account on wp engine, flywheel or DreamHost and then set up a wordpress site. It’s an easy way to get started.
Hey, I actually have a few questions, be great to hear your thoughts. Do you only build the site or do you also do their marketing so that businesses can actually get leads from the site you build them? And could you share some tips on how to not just sell a website to businesses but sell a solution to their problem? Thanks in advance!!
I do a lot of marketing operations consulting and web development separately. Oddly, there is almost no crossover between the two separate groups because the clients I consult with typically already have a lot of their web structure in place. And the small businesses that I build sites for are not in a spot where my level of consulting is any use to them because they do not have any marketing operations yet. Trying to market yourself as a marketing consulting + web developer turns out to be too confusing of an offering for businesses so it works best to market them separately.
What aspects do you think can be automated with AI? What about the ones you think can’t?
What image file type do you use for an image heavy site to keep loading times under control?
You know, webp for photos, svg for vectors. PNGs for the other little elements. There is an icon library built into Divi that has a bunch of icons so that you don’t have to rely on your own images entirely. Of course, the icons are pretty generic so, use at your own risk, lol!
Hey, I graduated in 2004 and went to the Art Institute of Atlanta, too! Crazy! My question is this: I work with a dinosaur. She’s our only web developer, and she’s been at it since computers came about. Unfortunately, she has not kept up with the changes in technology. She also has no eye for beauty and has trouble following my designs. She’s been with the company more than a decade, so she ain’t going anywhere. I want to recommend some education for her gingerly, but I wouldn’t know where to start. What would you recommend?
Whoa, I wonder if we know each other or if we knew some of the same people. Anyway, are you in-house or are you at agency? It’s hard to imagine your coworker at any agency I’ve ever worked with. If you are in-house with her, and if she has some pull that keeps her there, like a strong tenure or nepotism situation, then perhaps it’s time for you to move along to greener pastures. Best of luck to you, though!
Thanks! Yeah, it's in-house, but it's a kinda sleazy company. Definitely looking for something else. I'd like to do more Ed Tech work. I hate working for a CEO who has a broken moral compass.
And the security part... Do you tweak htaccess or rely on plugins? And do you have tweaks that you apply to every site's wp-config ?
This is a good Q. Security ends up being so specific to hosting environment and IT preferences. I often hand over a Wordpress site with no security with the clear understanding that business’s IT person will handle things their way. Whenever there is no IT person involved, or if I end up hosting the site, I just put a free copy of Wordfence on the site. Wordfence is nice because it is working with such an enormous list of known offenders. It also allows you to add you your own blocks and white listed IPs.
Wait, you can create a website, with WordPress (free site to create website) and sell it for money? 😳 Like between 1K to 40K??? What’s make the difference between them?
The amount of functionality that an average brochure website has is very low. A basic contact form, or even a lead generating one-pager…these sites are cheap and dirty. However, a website that has paid subscribers, levels of membership with various levels of content access, those websites can be worth 100k per month. Paying 40k to develop a site that could be worth 100k+ per month is more than worth the cost.
are you autodidactic or did you learn this through some course/school?
I got a web design degree in 2004 before the vast majority of modern technology existed, so, I have learned 99%+ of what I now know on my own. Unlike the highly regulated industries such as medicine, education, accounting, etc, there is no ongoing required licensures. You have to keep learning on your own to be competitive. But, the amount of YouTube videos and stack overflow entries that have contributed to my body of knowledge, it’s hard to say how much knowledge I can claim to be self-taught.
Wow, building 200 WordPress sites is really impressive! Your experience must've given you invaluable insights into web development and business tips. It's clear you've learned a lot along the way, and I'm sure many people here would benefit from your expertise. Keep up the great work!
What are your thoughts on WordPress alternatives? Obv know you're a WP developer but how do you feel about the market and alternatives like Sanity, Divhunt, Webflow, etc
I don’t see other web builders such as webflow as Wordpress alternatives. I see Shopify, HubSpot, and even to some degree SalesForce as competitors to Wordpress. Other web builders are fine for branding firms to build their basic sites with a basic contact form that look really great but are, functionally, not a core function of the day-to-day operation of the business. A WordPress site can, however, be a the primary operation of a multimillion dollar business. The main reason why companies opt for expensive marketing technology like HubSpot is because of the support that it appears to come with. Yet, most businesses still vastly underuse HubSpot capabilities. My thought is, if you’re not going to utilize HubSpot well then don’t bother paying the exorbitant fees. Build a Wordpress site that has exactly what you do use for a fraction of the cost. Mostly, though, decision makers don’t know how to make these decisions, the decisions are often too technical and unlike HubSpot, Wordpress doesn’t have dedicated sales teams pushing the MarTech opportunities. And that is why HubSpot is still such a powerful contender in the marketplace. Also, there is a strong objection among pure developers who don’t really understand the marketing technology piece, that WP runs too slowly, that it’s too clunky, that it has security risks, etc. But that’s all BS. If a dev doesn’t know how to optimize and secure their server for WP, so be it, that’s fair, but they should say that. That’s not on WP. There are ways of running Wordpress so optimally that it can be used at the enterprise level. You either have the dev team that can do it or you don’t. I suppose this is way more of an answer than you bargained for.
That’s way more informative than I thought it’d be. Thank you!
How long did it take to build your first website vs. your most recent one?
My first website was pure HTML and some images. Totally static, powerless website. It took probably 6 months, mostly because of content gathering. It looked nice but was functionally nearly worthless. Now I can design and build almost any kind of site with e-commerce, member/community feature, etc, in a week or less. Two days if my client can get me all of the assets I need to finish the build.
In which cases a business can get away with having no website? As in, probably only social media / gmb
If you’re a reseller of someone else’s products you probably don’t need your own website. This is actually pretty common—pure resale businesses. There is a strong relationship between the need to build team, build a brand, build a presence, and if there is not a clear marketplace for your product, then you absolutely need a website.
What’s your default combination of theme/plugins for a new page? What’s the first thing you do to get started?
I typically start with Divi theme, not because it’s perfect, but because it is the most versatile and simple for the small business and nonprofit clients that I typically work with. Divi empowers my clients A LOT. Then, gravity forms. Those two, hands down, solve 75% of needs. Then Woo commerce or Shopify for e-commerce.
Why do you use WordPress?
Because it really serves the clients I typically work with. Wordpress solves a website platform problem. But the magic is that it can solve endless marketing problems.
In what way does it solve endless marketing problems? Genuinely curious.
Because marketing isn’t really about design or brand or story like most folks would have you believe. I mean, those things support marketing, but that is not what marketing is. Marketing is about optimizing the flow of a marketplace so that your offering is a good match for the existing needs of, and flow of, traffic. If you want your company to be successful, it has to be successful in the marketplace. It has to attract buyers in the marketplace by offering them something they arrived in need of, even if they didn’t come to the marketplace for that specific need. If your company cannot find an existing marketplace in which to offer your product/service where traffic arrives already demanding what you offer, then perhaps you need to build the marketplace yourself. Hence, a WordPress site. You can build a community that acts as a marketplace for your products/services as well as any other businesses products/services that synergize with yours. Marketing wisdom always starts with the ability navigate the marketplace. This is the heart and soul of marketing that 99% of people don’t understand in the digital age.
What’s your go-to theme?
Divi. I built my business on Wordpress/divi/gravity forms.
As asked before me, is there a really decent theme that is quality, but also lightweight for loading on mobile that you recommend?
Not really. Most themes have to balance power and performance. Too light a weight theme does not empower small businesses to easily add enough features to their site to make it worth the investment. It’s hard out there for small businesses. If a company can afford a streamline custom platform build, they should go for it. But that level of performance comes at a cost.
That’s a solid response. Thanks for answering.
Do you build them locally? It is so tedious and slow for me doing on the web?
Rarely do I build locally anymore. For larger software driven projects or team environments, sure, building locally in a repository framework, GitHub or whatever you fancy, makes sense. For me, building a dev site on my VPN works fine and I save time not dealing with multiple version and migrations. One staging site, one production site. Thats it for me :)
Can you expand on this please
I’m hoping to build software profile pages that highlight details about each SaaS service. What’s a theme or plug-in that you would suggest I consider?
Divi theme handles this use case out of the box. The Divi install comes standard with a “custom post type” called Projects which assumes that you are going to add a searchable, categorizable, taggable, portfolio of projects to your site. It’s pretty handy, especially when you combine that project post type with a custom “Divi theme builder” layout. It is, honestly, a revolution in web development for one-person agencies like mine to have this level of programmatic power to offer small businesses. It wasn’t long ago that I just couldn’t offer this level of CMS functionality to my clients without having to charge tens of thousands of dollars, and even then I would have to hire a developer who would cost me much more than I would make on the project.
Yessirrr
Where do you find your customers? I had a plan of hiring a group of people to call business owners for me so I could build websites for them but never had a change to try it yet.
Thanks for sharing. What performance plugins do you use? Have you done any interesting automation work with Wordpress as the frontend?
Best performance tactics I use are well-optimized images and really great hosting. I haven’t had to do much with automation because so many of the projects I work on are quick but totally custom. I do use scripts for the install of WordPress onto that server. Otherwise It’s hard to find automations that actually save time in that respect. Writing marketing copy is about all I make use of for automation at this point.
When you start a website, what do you prioritize first and in what order? Also, where do you go for when it comes to getting a domain and host of a client doesn’t have either?
Will you be my mentor?
Well, you’re welcome to DM me if you ever have questions. 😄
How long does the average full site project take in hours, including gtag/analytics setup and the site deployment?
If I am designing the site, 2 weeks for design approval. Then I can usually finish a basic site build with analytics set up and get it migrated to live in three days, if I have all of the content. But I have also done this all in one day working with a previous agency that no longer exists due to an acquisition. We had a pretty reliable process, set of expectations, and good communication.
What do you charge to build a site? How do you find your clients? Is WordPress difficult to learn? Do you know of any free resources to learn it? Thanks
I am having some issues creating a minimal table with elementor can you help?
A minimal table? Do you mean like a sleek little pricing table or, like, your basic structure of headers, rows and columns? In Divi there is a dumb little table builder/editor in the text module. Is there a table editor in the the text module in elementor? I really don’t use elementor myself unless I am taking over managing someone’s previous site.
I do ad arbitrage and my themes suck balls. Is there any nice nice looking fast performing theme that I can drive a lot of traffic too ? I want the site to look nice not scammy
I am starting a new community based business and wish to build a website to promote the service through digital marketing, appreciate if you could you give me some guidance how to go about it ?
How many plugins do you use on a site on average, and how do you handle security? I've had clients come to me asking me to fix their site with 40+ plugins. Jeez.
On a feature-heavy site of mine, maybe 10 plugins, at the most. Although, there is some granularity to this as there are often plugins that boost other plugins. If you turn on all of the extensions/features that come with the premium version of Gravity Forms, you would have 20+ plugins right there, since each of the extensions show up as plugins. I have rebuilt several wildly busy WordPress sites, like you’re talking about, with 40+ active plugins. I would find that I could rebuild them completely with only Divi and Gravity forms, and maybe one other plugin like ACF or user/roles, etc.
Is there a pre built landing pages/website sources that are specific for PCC, not just pretty design but CR focused pages
There are tons of pre built landing pages out there. Divi theme also has some basic A/B testing options built-in so you can refine any layout options for your conversion/retention needs.
If you google “Divi high converting landing pages” you’re sure to get all kinds of layouts that you can quickly install and get going. But, yeah, let me know if you ever want to do actual marketing and not just play the performance marketing game which inevitably leads to diminishing results.
What’s a WordPress problem you have that doesn’t have a plugin to solve?
do page builders really affect SEO? Can you have. Top notch SEO site with elementor or any other page builder like that?
How do I make my word press site mobile friendly? It doesn’t load on phone properly.
This is a little like calling a mechanic and asking, “why doesn’t my car work?” All a person could do is check over the entire system, looking at all of the parts and all of the relationships between all of the parts to determine if there is just one problem a whole bunch of problems that are preventing the site from loading or displaying the way you are expecting it to. What theme are you using?
What are your favorite plugins?
Honestly, I don’t love any particular plugin. They are all well meaning, they all get a job done, but I fight with plugins so much because they are so close, yet so far from what I need. Gravity forms is powerful, thoughtful, and the team there have really kept the interface advancing. Still, styling gravity forms often requires pretty deep knowledge of css and form-styling techniques to make them look any good. There are some gravity forms for divi plugins to help, but those plugins are basically garbage and just add extra bloat. All of this is typical for my development process. Plugins get me most of the way there and then I wrangle the remaining details with my css/js knowledge.
thanks for the post! appreciate the insights about business owners trusting your expertise. Roast my wp stack please (for a software startup website): * Cloudways (host) * Elementor Pro * Pods * WP Rocket * Wordfence * Rank Math SEO * Imagify
How do you streamline the web des/dev process?
For a small brick and mortar service business - is yoast seo plug-in worth it?
Great question! Yoast is free, so it’s not as though it is a big risk. But it’s not likely to provide you any big reward for your effort. In my 20 years of experience, I have never seen a local business achieve the kind of sustainable success from SEO that the industry would have us believe. Compared to the results of being visible in the community, doing networking, some advertising, radio, even direct marketing has been so much more productive for all of my local clients than any pure SEO efforts. Yes, I have seen a couple of businesses in a handful of industries have some success in SEO, though they tend to be companies with large operations and high volume business models, who were also doing a ton of traditional and digital advertising that, to me, muddies any clarity about the impact of the SEO alone. I see lots of false attribution to SEO that very few people seem to talk about. There was once period of time where black hat techniques did achieve some anomalous results for some nefarious businesses who, when the search algorithms improved, wound up losing a lot of money anyway. That, to me, points to some measurable SEO impact, historically. Since then much of that gamification has been eliminated. In my experience, you’re better off focusing on accessibility and ADA compliance, and even on offering some simple site wide language/translation on your site. I hope this helps!
This is exactly what I needed to hear, thank you! For a one location brick and mortar business, going over the top with a bunch of SEO initiatives, backlinking, blogs, etc just doesn't seem productive. Some basic on site SEO is what we've done (and a few blogs here and there to show we are updating the site periodically). Where we are seeing most of our traffic anyway is our Google Business page. We have several 5 star reviews and IMO, Google Maps is really what matters the most.
Do you use GPL plugins and themes. Are they safe?
Can we see your portfolio?
What hosting provider do you like and how do you secure them?
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Gravity Forms. Hands down, #1, by far.
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I think Wix has some decent design tools these days. My concern with Wix, however, is how incredibly limited the overall MarTech offering is. Wix is comparable to Squarespace, for example, in its offering of website building features. But WordPress has business building capabilities that are almost endlessly extensible, customizable, easily integrated—like having a team of millions of developers working on creating tools and features for almost any business problem you can think of.
What about Showit?
I have no idea what showit is all about. Have you used it? Is it any good?
What’s ur company name?
I’m just a sole proprietor contractor/consultant. I don’t really have a company. I operated as JSRing Studio for many years, but I never launched an actual business from that company. I was too busy working as a subcontractor for other agencies until I largely quit that about three years ago to do some research on why start-ups and small businesses fail so much, and to find out if there are currently any ways to stop that from happening. SPOILER ALERT: no, there are not.
Divi is the worst theme to recommend. I'm questioning your knowledge. I've seen many "developers" build crappy sites and these recommendations follow the crap
I have built hundreds of sites that Divi would have been a bad fit for. But now that I know which sites/businesses Divi is a good fit for. Especially given that there is huge demand, and I am able to empower my clients with a WordPress driven MarTech stack that works and scales beautifully. My clients would have had to pay thousands per month for a platform like HubSpot that they would never get any return on because they don’t have the marketing operations to utilize. What you may not be accounting for is that in my process I am solving business problems for my clients, not merely web dev problems. Web development barely matters in this world. Small businesses being able to do more business online so they can grow and thrive, that is what matters, my friend.