Whats Your Favorite Website Builder?

[rievandesign]

Damion, I really get what your saying and again 1mil+ organic visitors to a site is unreal! Would you please shoot me over the url to that site. I would love to see what your doing.

I have built a couple health and fitness sites in Wordpress that were getting upwards of 75 to 90k hits per day using affiliate driven traffic. They ran horribly, even with a 24 core 16 gig ram server. We even used amazon cloud front for pier caching distribution. It still ran very badly. We used marketizator for split testing and hands down more than 1/3 the conversion rate on the same exact site built with a static framework. So I would love to see the site you are referring to. It would make a great case study.

I am also very curious how you do your social media and marketing as well. Any incite would be greatly appreciate. We have 2 in house social media managers that I direct. I would love to give them some new idea.

 

[Damion]

Damion, I really get what your saying and again 1mil+ organic visitors to a site is unreal! Would you please shoot me over the url to that site. I would love to see what your doing.

I have built a couple health and fitness sites in Wordpress that were getting upwards of 75 to 90k hits per day using affiliate driven traffic. They ran horribly, even with a 24 core 16 gig ram server. We even used amazon cloud front for pier caching distribution. It still ran very badly. We used marketizator for split testing and hands down more than 1/3 the conversion rate on the same exact site built with a static framework. So I would love to see the site you are referring to. It would make a great case study.

I am also very curious how you do your social media and marketing as well. Any incite would be greatly appreciate. We have 2 in house social media managers that I direct. I would love to give them some new idea.

I can share details through email or you can contact me through my main site at damionflynn.com (sorry, don't have 20 posts yet so I cannot post direct links yet)

We could go back and forth all day long on system specs and what not, but would be far beyond the scope of this board and would clutter the forum. It is not my intent to hijack this thread with systems specifications and what not

 

[rievandesign]

Damion, you have brought up some good points and I am intrigued with your site results. Couple you please elaborate on what you do in the way of advertising? how do you manage to gain so many organic page views to your site? Leaving the WordPress argument out of it. What other frameworks do you use for your sites? This thread is about website builders. What have you used?

 

[Damion]

Damion, you have brought up some good points and I am intrigued with your site results. Couple you please elaborate on what you do in the way of advertising? how do you manage to gain so many organic page views to your site? Leaving the WordPress argument out of it. What other frameworks do you use for your sites? This thread is about website builders. What have you used?

I primarily use Wordpress for the framework. I do occasionally use other CMS systems such as Drupal, Joomla, e107, as well as building from scratch using HTML, CSS, PHP/MySQL, and on rare occasions, I will use .NET if I have to connect to a MS DB.

I use an array of different advertising methods. I like to focus heavily on SEO and guest-blogging for long term organic results, but have also used viral strategies for Facebook/Instagram, and Youtube.

Non-organic, I use PPC through Google (I am a Google Certified Partner), through Facebook & Instagram (organic and PPC), and other Social Networks (albeit I do much less in Twitter or LinkedIn - something I need to work on).

I also do a lot of Direct Mail and Email Marketing, many times mixing them together to increase overall effectiveness. When it makes sense, I also put together dynamic relationship marketing sequences to maximize the effectiveness of an overall online strategy.

 

[Tiesto422]

I am a programmer and internet marketer. My background is in web development and web security but I primarily run as a project manager now as the owner of my consulting company.

I have ran tests against WP and a properly configured server using a good caching plugin works just as good as static html because you don't have to query the DB or run high balancing on the php engine. Every page is cached and served just as it would be in a static environment but with the bonus of ease of use and functionality that WP and plugins provide for lead capture.

On the particular website I mentioned earlier for the point, I do not run any paid traffic - that is all organic

Any security issues with WP? Been trying to do .php uploads to my godaddy website, however I realize I can't because it is a security issue.

 

[Damion]

Any security issues with WP? Been trying to do .php uploads to my godaddy website, however I realize I can't because it is a security issue.

You have to stay on top of things, for sure, with WP. Keeping up to date with stable releases is necessary, but balancing between staying up to date and managing plugins that may not yet be updated for compatibility can be an issue. You can get an idea of what is necessary and what is not by looking at release/patch notes.

There is nothing inherently insecure about php - it is a programming language. There are good scripts and bad scripts. Godaddy may just have it disabled on your particular hosting package. It is also possible that you are on a MS server that does not support php natively.

I really cannot say this with 100% certainty though as I do not use shared hosting packages.

 

[rievandesign]

Any security issues with WP? Been trying to do .php uploads to my godaddy website, however I realize I can't because it is a security issue.

Hi there, could you explain what you mean by uploads with php. Are you using a client side possible javascript to upload images, files exc. or are you logging into the back of your wp environment through wp-admin to upload stuff?

WordPress is an open source framework so it does come with some inherent security threats. Unless you truly trust the company that created the plug-ins you install, they also can be threats. I have had many wp sites taken down by people just being jerks wanting my products shut down (not all were wp specific). Please elaborate as to what you are trying to do, maybe I can assist you further.

Here are a few pretty good article on some threats that you may or may not know about https://managewp.com/wordpress-security-threats.
http://www.wpexplorer.com/security-wordpress-fixes/
http://askwpgirl.com/assessing-the-security-risk-of-using-wordpress-as-a-cms/

 

[Damion]

Hi there, could you explain what you mean by uploads with php. Are you using a client side possible javascript to upload images, files exc. or are you logging into the back of your wp environment through wp-admin to upload stuff?

WordPress is an open source framework so it does come with some inherent security threats. Unless you truly trust the company that created the plug-ins you install, they also can be threats. I have had many wp sites taken down by people just being jerks wanting my products shut down (not all were wp specific). Please elaborate as to what you are trying to do, maybe I can assist you further.

Here are a few pretty good article on some threats that you may or may not know about https://managewp.com/wordpress-security-threats.
5 Default Security Threats in WordPress and How to Fix Them - WPExplorer
7 Things to Keep in Mind When Assessing the Security Risk of Using WordPress as a CMS from Ask WP Girl

I did not read the articles you posted but I imagine they say the same basic things like using a different username than admin, use better password, update regularly, etc.

WP has a huge support community of coders dedicated to nothing but security. They find issues, they patch them, and there is update. While it is possible that your WP installation could be hacked based on a security issue, you have a less than 1% chance (I think the actual statistic was something around .47%) of being hacked if you keep your installation updated. In fact, your hosting panel (most use CPanel or Plesk for WP installations) has a higher likelihood of being compromised than your actual WP installation as long as you keep it updated.

Of course, this is a balancing act because your plug-ins may not work with major changes so sometimes people wait for the plugin updates before updating the main installation.

Now, plugins also have some vulnerability issues, but rarely on major plugins. Looking for good reviews and regular updates will prevent most problems. Paid plugins go a lot further in the security department than free ones as they have a responsibility to their customers.

The biggest vulnerability in WP is in themes. WP has a huge theme repository and this is where most access is gained outside of brute-force attempts on weak user/pass combos. Buy a theme or have a developer that knows what they are doing build you a theme or modify a bought theme and you will alleviate most of your problems.

 

[rievandesign]

Like I said WordPress has it's place, Let's try to assist Tiesto422 with what he is trying to do. Maybe WordPress is the best solution, maybe not. I have seen WordPress do some great things for companies. I have also seen it become more of a pain than it's worth. I personally like programming in Laravel, others like Zend but WordPress would be a lot simpler to deploy than a new Laravel app.

 

[Damion]

Like I said WordPress has it's place, Let's try to assist Tiesto422 with what he is trying to do. Maybe WordPress is the best solution, maybe not. I have seen WordPress do some great things for companies. I have also seen it become more of a pain than it's worth. I personally like programming in Laravel, others like Zend but WordPress would be a lot simpler to deploy than a new Laravel app.

Agreed, but it was worth responding to your comments on WP security since you brought it up.

His problem appears to be his host more than a framework. He said GoDaddy would not allow him to upload php because of security. That, in and of itself, does not make a lot of sense without more information, but it definitely seems more host/server than anything else. Since WP runs on php, if his host does not allow php, he would have to switch hosts/server to run it anyways..or pretty much anything for that matter unless he has a specific use he needs to use MS solutions