Okay, so you’re about to setup your home business and create your first site. You know what product or service you’re going to sell, and that’s fine. But what platform are you going to use for your site? Have you given it any thought? If not, this article is going to give some advice based on a few common models. The one you choose, at least I hope, will be the best fit for the model of YOUR particular business. Keep reading to find out more.

Back in the stone ages, the common platform was a static HTML site that you either coded yourself in some WYSIWYG editor or paid a web designer oodles of money to do. Trust me, those folks still charge a fortune, even though it HAS become a lot easier to get your own sites up and running. But it’s not so much the doing that is the problem. It’s the deciding. With so many choices today, one doesn’t have to settle for a static site. But maybe a static site is the best solution. If all you’re putting up is a single sales page, then maybe it is. On the other extreme, if you’re going to be doing a lot of modifying to the site in terms of look, content and so on, maybe a static platform is still the best solution. Why do I say that?

To answer the question, we turn to another solution…CMS sites. CMS stands for Content Management Site or Solution. Probably the most popular are WordPress and Joomla, though there are plenty of others. Why would you want to use a platform like WordPress for your home business? Well, one very good reason would be if you wanted your prospects to interact with you by leaving comments on your pages. Now sure, you can still do this with a static site. Remember the old guestbook function of years ago? Problem is, this does require some coding knowledge and many home business startup folks don’t have the skills. So they have to outsource the site creation. With WordPress, it’s all part of the platform. You just install and it’s done.

Then of course there is the membership model. What if you decide that you want to run a membership site? Well, while you can do this with something like WordPress, it is a lot easier to do with a platform like Amember, which is specifically designed for memberships. If you don’t like the high cost, you can always go with DLGuard. The difference is with DLGuard, you have to do a little more coding for your member pages whereas Amember gives you some nice templates. But DLGuard is the cheaper solution. Point is, for membership sites, a static site or a WordPress site might not be your best option.

So you see, you need to look at your business model and then, depending on what it is, decide which platform will be best for you. I’ve given you a few examples that are the most common. From these, you should be able to make your decision.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

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