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Hey bud,

I've been through this myself... Obviously I don't quite know your level of expertise, but I'll tell you my experience.

I have basic html/css experience, but I'm no web developer - I built a website which has multiple membership levels, a members only forum, it takes payments, some of thoes payments are onlgoing monthly, some are up-front depending on the product. The website communicates all purchases with my Infusionsoft database of course.

I did it all myself using a number of programs and plugins which I'm happy to list if you want to know.

This is what I learned:

1) You can do it all on your own, but be careful you're clear on what you need to accomplish, fully test each product/plugin out as much as you can before purchasing the paid version wiht all the features.

2) You'll have an inefficient website that's slower because it's running lots of plugins.

3) I saved myself $5k - $10k for the work.

4) After building the site, I paid someone $1000 to get my page load times right down, and streamline my site.

5) Since I built it all myself, it's now really easy to make ongoing changes. I could never go back to having to constntly communicate witha developer for every little thing.

6) Unless I had a LOT of money, I'd always build the site myself first, until my business concept was proven and profitable.

But I'm sure others here will have their own opions on this.

 

You're welcome.

So:

1) I use wordpress for my website (becuase of the sheer number of plugins it supports)

2) I use Divi Theme plugin (it is a website builder with a huge amount of customisability, and I can make a really good looking site with relative easse) Divi appears on a LOT of websites, but you rarely realise it.

3) I use MemberMouse to handle my memberships.

4) I use Stripe to process my payments

5) I use Leadpages for some of my squeeze pages (but you could do that in divi theme if you wanted to)

6) I use Zapier to communicate all my purchases /memberships to Infusionsoft (and a number of other systems that I need to inter-communicate.

7) I use cloudflare + w3 total cache to ensure my website is loaded up nice and fast.

 

Definitely use WordPress. It’s perfect for starting out. There are other CMS platforms that are much more performant but you can piece together anything in WordPress.

Checkout the buddypress or bbpress plug-ins. Those should give you the user accounts and forum type functionality your looking for. I would also suggest looking at lifterlms because it does membership, billing and integrates with a heap of other products.

If your on WordPress and your building it yourself don’t skimp on hosting and security. Pay for a good wp host like WpEngine. It costs more but it has built in security, catching and other features that can make your hobbled together site perform at least average and help it from getting spammed and hacked constantly.

 

Well there's lots of different forum software out there, but I found Vanilla Forum played very nicely when it came to integrating with Wordpress sites that already have membership software installed since they store the forum member records inside of wordpress, so that's what I used.