Fastlane Business Using Wordpress

[dreamer]

I'm going to ask a serious question and I'd appreciate serious opinions back because I'm sure a “real answer” is all a matter of opinion...

Do you think it's possible, in this day and age, to create a Fastlane business online (whatever that business may involve... either affiliate marketing, selling products physical or digital, selling services or something else online, perhaps a membership site or a social media site, etc) that is 100% created and ran using Wordpress? Let's even take it down a notch and assume the person who came up with the idea and starts the website (me) is say and “intermediate” level user with Wordpress. So I know how to use it and can troubleshoot and figure out a lot of things on my own but I'm by no means a “web programmer.” Do you think it's possible I could be successful, or do you think it's absolutely necessary I hire a programmer to professionally design and develop my website to compete with sites in my niche?

I have ideas for websites all the times, most of them are crap yes... but I have a few good ones and I'm just not sure if I should go for it and try and make it own my own, or try and get professional help. Only problem is, I don't have the funds to pay for professional help, and if my website doesn't turn out to make me any money, then I'm in the negative and it's back to square one. At least if I design and make it myself, I won't lose any money if my site doesn't make me any money. But is this even possible??


Thanks!!

 

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[ilrein]

Chances are any idea that you have, can be done in Wordpress, and already has been.

 

[TJPB]

Build it yourself and use "pro" help only for those things that require it. This is exactly what I've done and it came out pretty nice.

 

[Daniel A]

I absolutely believe it's possible...

https://wordpress.com/notable-users/

^ Remember, (apparently) some of those are using WordPress.com ... but you're most likely going to NEED to use WordPress.org. I'm actually surprised it mentioned some of those sites use WordPress.com

EDIT: Apparently there is something called WordPress.com VIP -- and some big sites use it. So if you ever get to that stage, you should be covered. Just a quick change to WordPress.com VIP (whatever that is) ... which I need to look into more.

Also, WooCommerce can be used for running an eCommerce business on WordPress.

I'm in the process of developing skills -- and becoming more proficient with WordPress is one of them.

Go for it man! Learn WordPress.

 

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[Digamma]

LOL, of course. You can always have a professional put hands on it when you scale. Just start.

 

[David P]

Couple links for you. Research them and try it out, Good luck.

Don't forget InfusionSoft has a number of very good tools, all with WP integration.

http://newrainmaker.com/

http://www.pagelines.com/

D

 

[JoeB]

Wordpress is excellent for building websites and testing ideas at relatively little cost.

If your idea doesn't work out, it hasn't really lost you any money. If it does work out you will have the money to build a completely new, custom site if you need to.

Can't see a problem at all with using Wordpress.

 

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[PedroG]

Yes. Check out RestaurantEngine.com. That guy built that whole business with wordpress. He's a web designer, not really a programmer.

Check out his post here where he explains a little bit about how he did it: http://casjam.com/restaurant-engine-my-latest-thing/

 

[consty]

Yes.

You're overthinking it however.

Focus on getting ONE customer first.

 

[Thiago Machado]

I think so too.

Almost all the guys on Shark Tank use it.

Check out the infographic below.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240525

 

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[samuraijack]

website is just a tool bro. What is your business offering? and then you can decide what kind of website will do the trick

 

[The-J]

That's like asking if you can build a Fastlane business using Facebook ads.

You can. Wordpress is just a tool to get a website up and running. A website is just a tool to do a ton of functions (POS, sales material, contact info, etc). Just like Facebook ads is a tool to get your product in the eyes of as many people as possible.

Go with Wordpress. PM me if you need help.

 

[healthstatus]

I do over a 10 million visitors a year on a site that is mostly Wordpress.

 

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[mt_myke]

No. Longer WP rant when I'm on a fullsized device...

 

[Brett877]

I personally love WordPress, I develop websites for my clients and have used WordPress for 90% of the jobs. It allows such easy to use framework a endless amount of templates and customization you can do and it is all relatively inexpensive to get if you don't have the skills to design it yourself. Templates are usually around $50 and plugins are free - $$ whatever your budget is.

My recommendation is to jump in and learn it and experiment with it, the SEO plugins and WordPress design allows for great love with the search engines. Which in turn will help you with your site visits and potentially conversions if your site is set up right. Something I learned about the internet is, people are not as concerned about how much your site looks like a million bucks, they are concerned about what you can get them and how they can be helped if they have an issue. Remember Customer Service is key on the internet.... and in a brick and mortar store... but thats a different topic

 

[Traveling Morgue]

Yeah, you can use Wordpress to prove your MVP. I know Groupon started on Wordpress. Then as others have said go pro if you think it will help.

 

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[johnp]

I hate WordPress. I avoid it at all costs. It's decent if you want to build a nice looking website fast. But if you're looking to build something huge, with a lot of customization, scalability & user interaction between users, then good luck with Word Press. I'm not saying that it's not possible..people are obviously doing it. I just think that it's 10x easier to do it from scratch. Just my opinion, from someone who runs a couple of complex sites that were not build on WP.

Can you build a fastlane business on WP? Yes. You can also do it though direct mail, door to door sales, etc..a website does not = a fastlane biz.

The real question that you should be asking is if wordpress is the right solution for what you're trying to accomplish. Will it speed up the time that it takes to get to the market? Will wp slow it down? Will the site continue to work as the site scales? How much customization will you now and into the future? Start there and figure out some of that stuff.

If you're looking to do a huge site then I would look into building a php site on Linode. Check found foundation.zurb, it's fairly easier to design a responsive site using their framework.

 

[Andy Black]

Lots of great answers here.

I run lead gen for a client. Literally a one page site using wordpress. It didn't have to be wordpress of course.

So yes, I'd say Wordpress suffices.

However, you're focused too much on underlying technology. The most important thing to work out is WHY you're doing what you're doing, then WHAT to do. HOW is a very distant third and pretty much irrelevant.

If you want to hang a picture on the wall, then you could drill a hole or hammer in a picture hook. It doesn't matter what brand of drill you choose if you decide to drill a hole.

HTH

 

[mt_myke]

I have a lot of reasons to hate WP, and most here won't care. So I'll cut this short to just a few points. People give WP a lot of credit for things that aren't WP at all. Take the templates. Guess what, most WP templates are made with Bootstrap (or similar) - you can get Bootstrap templates that are completely separate from WP, it's just some CSS and Javascript and works just as well with completely static HTML. In a similar vein, yes you can get WP plugins to do things like contact forms...or you can use any of a number of tiny stand-alone components. I've even seen some implemented entirely within Javascript and shipped as part of the premade Bootstrap-based generic templates just mentioned. For my most recent project I opted to go with small stand-alone components for things like the blog and mailing list functionalities, and was able to modify them in a short amount of time to do exactly what I wanted. That isn't feasible with a huge monolithic architecture like WP, but you really don't need much code for just a minimal blog or just a minimal mailing list manager. It's when you decide that a quick WP plugin will be just fine that you've unknowingly set yourself up for a lot of future pain.

I'm sure many here will sing the praises of WP, but in my experience WP as the backbone of your entire enterprise will come back to bite you later. It's great for a 20-minute web site because it's so easy to get going with, but that ease comes by flexibility and modularization being sacrificed. There are many (as in thousands) of other frameworks, and the best of those are also a much better foundation than WP. However, none are as easy to get going, and by the time people realize why building everything on WP may be a mistake it's usually too late.

WP is pretty much the McDonald's of webapp frameworks. I've had people tell me "...but large% of the internet runs on WP, therefore it MUST be awesome!" Well, I suspect a large percentage of all lunches and dinners each day are eaten at McDonald's as well. That has as much relevance to proving that a McD burger and fries is a great meal as 10,000 "look at my puppy!" sites do to proving that WP is a good choice for YOUR site. Same with the overabundance of choices, I've been in Manhattan with scared white college kids who ate at McDonald's the WHOLE TIME, because all the awesome NYC local food was too scary and they didn't know anything about any of it.

WP is certainly the easy/quick choice, just like grabbing a quick greasy burger at McD. There's also TONS of people who do WP development and support, and you're gonna need them if your website needs ever grow much beyond a basic landing page. I've used WP many times myself, but always for sites that were either actually blogs (for which WP is good, being a blogging platform after all) or were proofs-of-concept that could be discarded with few tears when it came time to make a real product. The management at my day job were sold on WP for their new site (against my objections of course) and it's been a nightmare factory ever since. Meanwhile the older "from scratch" sites run fine with much fewer resources and never have any fun surprises like all the website content disappearing after adding some additional fields to the post templates. It's pretty telling that the webdev guy - who hates the command line and always goes with GUI tools - has nevertheless chosen to interact directly with the database rather than WP's own admin pages.

 

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[Jon Snow]

I've been working as web developer for almost 3 years.
Yes, you can start with wordpress. I've done it for lots of my clients.
Now, I'm building my own start-up, but use Code Igniter framework for flexibility reason.

 

[MendeGames]

I personally build all my websites on Wordpress, and yes, it is most certainly possible to create a fastlane business using Wordpress. The success of a website has so little based off of how good it looks and so much on the quality of the content or the product. Take for example Craigslist (especially what it looked like 2 years ago). Anyone with a semester's worth of knowledge about HTML and PHP could have made a more aesthetically pleasing website, but because of the utility and content of the website, people still used it anyway. Now it's one of the top websites on the internet.

 

[Gale4rc]

The answer is: YES

and you don't even need a product, you can just grow your blog and then sell your services / a membership to a private section of your WP site.

 

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