Which website builder should I use?

[yyes]

Since your goal is to run paid advertising to you website, the following things should probably matter to you.

Speed: You want a fast website on a fast server. You don't want visitors who's click you paid for clicking the "back" button in their browser because the page was too slow to load.

With platforms that host the website for you, you don't need to worry about the server, as that's taken care of.

With self-hosted, it's not that simple. For example, we're running ads to our own self-hosted pages, but have a very fast (and accordingly priced) server. Makes sense for us because we use it for multiple clients.

But we had some clients whose both website and server are so slow that it made me wonder if anyone even waits to see the page.

Flexibility: You want the ability to add tracking codes from various services. Potentially other codes too, such as live chat.

You want some form of tracking on your website, to gain insight how visitors interact with it, where they come from, which devices they use etc.

Then you can adjust accordingly, test assumptions, see what works, what doesn't, and continuously refine your website to make it perform better and better.

Design: You want your website to look great on a variety of devices, from smartphones to desktops.

Enough said. You don't want to lose a potential customer just because your website didn't look right on their device. Especially in something like carpet cleaning, where they can be a customer for years to come, refer you etc.

There are many great solutions.

Personally, if a friend asked me, I'd recommend self-hosted Wordpress website, as it aligns nicely with above considerations.

If you use a good hosting and don't drown it with too many plugins or some clunky theme, speed should be fine. There are also plugins and other ways to speed it up.

Flexibility is also great, you can add any tracking codes you need.

Design - there's an abundance of themes to choose from.

Downside of a self-hosted solution is that it needs maintenance. Even if only just regular updates and backups. Not a big deal, but I've seen many business owners who just neglect to do it.

So if that's a hassle for you, then hosted solutions might be better.

Would you say it's better than squarespace ?

 

[Andy Black]

Get a free listing on a directory.

Run Google Ads to that listing. Low budget as you’re “buying data”.

See how much of your volume is mobile or not.

Maybe the data will suggest you start with a mobile-only landing page. We have a few clients where we only run mobile campaigns and to a mobile only landing page.

 

[masterneme]

I'll throw another option in case you want to get your hands dirty to have something ultra-customized and lightweight HTML5 Boilerplate: The web’s most popular front-end template

If you don't want to spend time coding I think Wordpress is the best option, it has tons of free plugins for any functionality you want. Get some cheap hosting and you're good to go.

 

[Edwin Fernandez]

WP is the way to go, and if you go with Wordpress you may want to go right for WP 5 with the Gutenberg web builder already baked in. I think it is released...
Otherwise if you implement any custom functionality like plugins, it may not be backwards compatible with the new WP 5 update with Gutenberg.

 

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[Bigguns50]

Hey @yyes ... so I just started a service business, consulting, and used GoDaddy's website builder. One day and I was live. Down side is it's like $22/mo and there aren't yet any add-ons. However, for what I need, it works. It also has on-line scheduling for appointments along with the usual email, phone.

 

[Bigguns50]

Being live doesn't really mean anything.........

??

I can be live within 5 minutes from now if I wanted a new site. That includes getting a www and building the site..... but that will never get me found on the internet.

Ok...I'm REALLY hoping most know that. Anything of value you want to add to the conversation ?

 

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[Andy Black]

AndyTalks with @Contrarian about starting his side hustle in local lead gen

 

[Andy Black]

Get a free listing on a directory. Run Google Ads to that listing. Low budget as you’re “buying data”. See how much of your volume is mobile or not. Maybe the data will suggest you start with a mobile-only landing page. We have a few clients where we only run mobile campaigns and to a mobile only landing page.

No response to this. Curious why...

 

[minivanman]

Ok...I'm REALLY hoping most know that. Anything of value you want to add to the conversation ?

You acted like it was a big deal that within 1 day you was live... wooohooo, anyone can be live within a few minutes. You basically said it works for you.... not if you are wanting people to find you it's not; so you was wrong there. You are getting screwed at $22 a month but you chose to share and with no pictures mind you. You said you have on-line scheduling for appointments along with the usual email, phone.... doesn't all of them have that feature?.... so I guess in short.... do YOU have anything of value to add to the conversation because you sure didn't add 1 ounce of value with that worthless post. Both you and I wasted time we will never get back by commenting about your more than worthless post.

 

[yyes]

Get a free listing on a directory.

Run Google Ads to that listing. Low budget as you’re “buying data”.

See how much of your volume is mobile or not.

Maybe the data will suggest you start with a mobile-only landing page. We have a few clients where we only run mobile campaigns and to a mobile only landing page.

My bad Andy. I must have missed your post. I actually read Perry Marshalls Adwords book that you suggested. It was amazing.

Looking to follow your advice. In fact, here are my next steps:

1. Im writing a Direct Response letter and targeting individuals who have six figure incomes and are over the age of 40.
2. Im looking to build a website but dont know how I would weed out people that are price shopping online.

With Direct Mail, its easy to weed out individuals that could potentially be price shopping, but online, I imagine its harder to do?

 

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[Andy Black]

My bad Andy. I must have missed your post. I actually read Perry Marshalls Adwords book that you suggested. It was amazing.

Looking to follow your advice. In fact, here are my next steps:

1. Im writing a Direct Response letter and targeting individuals who have six figure incomes and are over the age of 40.
2. Im looking to build a website but dont know how I would weed out people that are price shopping online.

With Direct Mail, its easy to weed out individuals that could potentially be price shopping, but online, I imagine its harder to do?

You say:

“I’m writing”

“I’m looking to build”


Who are you going to help today?

What would happen if you went looking for people to help, this very moment (and helped them)?


Check out this chat:

• (Audio) First sale in 30 days by helping people

You also seem to be looking for a demographic (over 40 with six figure income). With paid search, it’s more about the search intent than the demographic.

Consider looking for a demonstrated cashflow instead of a demographic too. What have people spent money on already that indicates they have the problem you have the paid solution for?


And finally, I’d say it’s easier to find price shoppers online? Their search terms indicate they’re shopping. Maybe check out the free lessons in my course (linked to in my signature).

 

[SEBASTlAN]

I think Squarespace is the best after trying almost all of the tools out there.

 

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[yyes]

I think Squarespace is the best after trying almost all of the tools out there.

What makes you say that?

 

[yyes]

Go with Weebly. The upgrade designers.weebly platform. Very easy. Click, drag & drop. You can add whatever photos, a survey, etc w/pre- qualifying questions if you want, have email inquiries sent right to your mobile phone if you want. Mobile friendly. Never had any problem with poor response. Around $15/mo per site. Learn some SEO & you'll be at the top of Goog looking down at everyone else in time.
Don't rely solely on word of mouth for business. Get more 'fishing lines' in the water & you'll have more chances of catching more 'fish'. Craigslist is free & like in the top 50 of most visited websites on the web so you'd be foolish not to post your business ad on there 1x a week. So what if you only get 1-2 calls a month from there @ $400/ea sale. Ya never know what'll bite til you throw a line in the water.

I had never heard of weebly..will definitely look into it

 

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[Ricko]

Personally, I need my website to be responsive. It needs to be compatible with mobile and it needs to be fast.

I used Wix for my site. It was beyond easy to set up the desk top page and then it also created a mobile friendly site which only needed one or two tiny manual tweaks. Again this was very easy to do.

The Wix site builder also has an excellent integrated SEO tool but this should only be used for your initial customers. An excellent service and word of mouth is the only way to sustain and grow a business.

I don't have any experience with the other platforms but I can recommend Wix.

 

[minivanman]

Go with Weebly. The upgrade designers.weebly platform. Very easy. Click, drag & drop. You can add whatever photos, a survey, etc w/pre- qualifying questions if you want, have email inquiries sent right to your mobile phone if you want. Mobile friendly. Never had any problem with poor response. Around $15/mo per site. Learn some SEO & you'll be at the top of Goog looking down at everyone else in time.
Don't rely solely on word of mouth for business. Get more 'fishing lines' in the water & you'll have more chances of catching more 'fish'. Craigslist is free & like in the top 50 of most visited websites on the web so you'd be foolish not to post your business ad on there 1x a week. So what if you only get 1-2 calls a month from there @ $400/ea sale. Ya never know what'll bite til you throw a line in the water.

gClaw, Do you add your own H1 to your Weebly site? If not, I can show you how if you'd like. None of the drag & drops are H1's.

 

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[DustinH]

Personally, I need my website to be responsive. It needs to be compatible with mobile and it needs to be fast.

The responsiveness is important to me because clients should be able to click on my phone number from their smartphone to call, or click on my email address to email me, etc.

Also, I'm looking to add before and after pictures of my work. Preferably high resolution pictures.

So in a nutshell my website has to be fast, responsive, and compatible with the mobile.

The Genesis Framework checks all those boxes. They should have a good child theme you easily customize. StudioPress is the creator of Genesis. Their websites are optimized to be mobile responsive, fast loading, etc, etc.

 

[Salesmate]

I would go with Wordpress. There are a lot of great Free Templates or cheap really good templates.

Here is how I have built a service company in the past:

• Get a Wordpress Website setup, easy setup something like this: WordPress Hosting | A Managed Solution for the Best Value – GoDaddy $50 Per Year
• Use a free template or spend $20-$60
• Spend 10-15 Hours building your standard & Service pages (Standard: Home, About Us, Contact Us), (Service Pages) - Have the entire website focused on the area you are servicing so people in your area will find you.

Then you are off to the races w/ SEO. Your competition will be pretty light, so just claiming your business listing w/ Google & Bing, will be a good start. Then you can try some Off-Page SEO practices.

You will learn a lot but really it is a simple concept. You should be getting inbound leads in the first 30-60 days if you do things right. Then over time, you can rise in your rankings.

$100 Cash + 10-15 Hours of work is not bad for getting inbound leads where you can start closing business.

Let me know if you need any help. I can give you some guidance for Title Tags, Meta Tags, and other things.

 

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[Flybye]

I use Adobe Muse. Ive been using it for several years. Sadly, Adobe announced they will no longer be supporting it in a few years, but I have not found an equivalent to it. I really like the editing of mobile vs desktop side by side, there are tons of templates available, and tons of widgets, too. It is easy to use, and no coding is necessary.

 

[PhilKowalski]

When it comes to SEO there are a lot of influencing factors. The standard comparison for the Google ranking algorithm is usually the Coca Cola recipe. A lot of stuff goes into it and it's sometimes hard to explain. I have a decent track record in SEO as well as in website creation.

@Wolfman - I'm happy to help if you need support with SEO, just let me know...

 

[yyes]

Correct me if im wrong, but the only problem that I see with all these website builders is that they have their name in your url. So lets say my website is called carpetcleaning.com.

If I use any of these website builders, my url would look like:

• carpetcleaning.wordpress.com
• carpetcleaning.squarespace.com
• carpetcleaning.weebly.com

I dont know if theres a negative behind this.

 

[Neville Medhora]

Hey @yyes!

I'm a semi-Wordpress pro now, and can confirm there's a long learning curve, especially in the initial setup if you're not very technical.

However you can try Wordpress.com....it's under $5/mo and you can try out a basic Wordpress site that's already hosted, setup, and ready to go.

I think it's a great way to dip your toe into Wordpress if you're not ready to setup hosting + domains on your own!

Also I truly believe learning Wordpress well may have been the biggest advantage I have over my competition. So if you want, I'd say go for it! There's literally a$$-tons of free videos and articles on how to manage every aspect of WP.

Also on CodeMentor.io you can simply hire an available Wordpress programmer to help you for as little as 15 minutes at a time. I've used it multiple times to solve problems I couldn't figure out myself (even the AppSumo development team has an unlimited subscription since you can solve problems SO MUCH FASTER by just asking an experienced person than doing a bunch of StackOverflow research yourself)!
-N

 

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[Real Deal Denver]

I asked a question earlier in my own thread in order to write this post. I asked if those sites that you can test your own website on are any good.

The reason I asked that is because I was amazed when I tested several different sites from several different types of businesses, including Weebly.com and Wordpress.com. There was only 2 sites, just 2 that had as high of a score as my Weebly site that I built and totally maintain myself. I have no training, nothing as far as building or doing the SEO on a website except what I taught myself. Weebly scored the same as me on most every test site but Wordpress was way below. I used like 5 of those test sites. I'm about to build another site that will go nation wide within 2 years and with these results, I'm really scared to not use Weebly. I was going to try Wordpress but I think I will wait until I have a smaller scale site to test it out with. Weebly might not have all the bells and whistles but it sure does bring me customers and customers = profit for me.

Great post! Spoken like a true businessman that truly understands the game!

Results are all that matters. Everything else is just experience. Of course, the more experience you have, the better your results will be, but in the end it's the results that pay the bills!

 

[masterneme]

Hi, You are all techie-geeks compared to me. I will soon develop a website and you've helped me a lot (I like the back and forth.) Do you have to pay individually for all of these mini-features (click to email/phone, cell phone compatible, scheduling, SEO, payment options...)? Are you toast if you're not on the 1st page of a google search?
I could spend a ton of $/time on SEO but w/ my start(ing)-up, I don't even know if that time/$ is worth it. Being at the top of the page may make me $1,000 but if it cost $1,100 and 10 hours of work to get there, is it worth it?
Greg

There are many free plugins that will give you all the functionality you need. Many are freemium and they make money from people who need extra features or want support from the developer but the free versions are more than enough.

You won't be toast by not being on the 1st page but it will certainly give you more business if you're. There's a way to make a killing even if you do everything else wrong by building a lot of backlinks strategically.

It works like this:

Imagine I run a service for new entrepeneurs on how to do SEO right and build a customized website using heatmaps to analize how visitors behave.

Then I come here and I write and extensive post explaining everything. And at the end I put a link with a call to action for anyone interested in the results but doesn't have time or doesn't want to bother doing the thing.

The next day I go to another community and write another post.

The next day a guest blog post.

The next day I make a Youtube video.

The next day I put my site on directories.

The next day I put an ad on Craigslist (or whatever) and create a bot who automatically renews the ad.

The next day...

If you keep doing this over time you'd have built a massive network that will give you traffic even if you're banned from Google.

As a side effect, you'll gain ranks because good backlinks will give you a higher quality/page score and you'll be less vulnerable to disappear when Google makes changes to the algorithm.

It's one of the classic Internet Marketing strategies that many people overlook.

The key as always is provide value.

 

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[minivanman]

There are many free plugins that will give you all the functionality you need. Many are freemium and they make money from people who need extra features or want support from the developer but the free versions are more than enough.

You won't be toast by not being on the 1st page but it will certainly give you more business if you're. There's a way to make a killing even if you do everything else wrong by building a lot of backlinks strategically.

It works like this:

Imagine I run a service for new entrepeneurs on how to do SEO right and build a customized website using heatmaps to analize how visitors behave.

Then I come here and I write and extensive post explaining everything. And at the end I put a link with a call to action for anyone interested in the results but doesn't have time or doesn't want to bother doing the thing.

The next day I go to another community and write another post.

The next day a guest blog post.

The next day I make a Youtube video.

The next day I put my site on directories.

The next day I put an ad on Craigslist (or whatever) and create a bot who automatically renews the ad.

The next day...

If you keep doing this over time you'd have built a massive network that will give you traffic even if you're banned from Google.

As a side effect, you'll gain ranks because good backlinks will give you a higher quality/page score and you'll be less vulnerable to disappear when Google makes changes to the algorithm.

It's one of the classic Internet Marketing strategies that many people overlook.

The key as always is provide value.

Is this how you do all of yours, and with Wordpress? How many sites have you made?

I think I'm going to make some sort of small site and try Wordpress. After using Weebly for 7 years, it's kind of exciting to use something different.

 

[masterneme]

Is this how you do all of yours, and with Wordpress? How many sites have you made?

I think I'm going to make some sort of small site and try Wordpress. After using Weebly for 7 years, it's kind of exciting to use something different.

I did it in the past with 4 Wordpress based sites that are now gone and I'm doing it now to promote a game I'm making and that I have no website for.

It's important to keep in mind that you genuinely need to want to provide value and interact with people or you'll be perceived as the regular bro-marketing guru putting in practice some scheme.

 

[minivanman]

And all of those sites went to the 1st page of Google and stayed for years and years through all the changes Google made doing it that way?

 

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[masterneme]

And all of those sites went to the 1st page of Google and stayed for years and years through all the changes Google made doing it that way?

Only one did for certain keywords. Well, another one did show up too but because I hijacked some keywords so I don't count that.

But the point I was trying to make is that you can get traffic without being searchable and without paying.

I'm sure any of the SEO pros here can give you a better answer than me.

 

[Chaz Heasley]

Hey guys I'm looking for advice on what platform to use in order to build my website.

My business is a service based business. Specifically, it's a painting /carpet cleaning business

Initially I thought I would use squarespace or just learn Javascript and html and build website from scratch.

However, I have also been thinking about clickfunnels . But at the same time, I think clickfunnels is geared towards a product based business where customers can buy online rather than a service based business where customers would want you to go to their homes and give them an estimate.

What would you guys advise?

Wix or squarespace make it easy to create a professional looking website. WordPress is good for blogging but you can upgrade it with pluggins for adding payment options, forms, ect. They all have their advantages it all depends on what you prefer.

 

[Rila Studios]

I highly recommend wordpress, because
1.Its very easy to use
2.Good for SEO

I heard wix is not too good for seo and an delay the process. I use wordpress now so I recommend it.