New and confused!

[Night Stars]

I've been researching for about a month and am so glad I found this site - quite honestly this seems to be the most helpful forum! So here's my dilemma, I already have a niche and also purchased a domain name. At the time I purchased the domain name I had also tried a free trial with a hosting company which set me up on wordpress.org I attempted to figure out word press, got extremely frustrated (I am a TOTAL newbie) and decided to ditch the whole idea. Fast forward to today...I decide I really do want to give this a go and begin researching again. Of course I came across Site Build It and a million reviews of how wonderful it is, blah, blah, blah. I also came across people saying STAY AWAY - total waste of 299.00 I really don't know what to do. I used to be a realtor and had a blog on word press and for some reason that was extremely easy to update, etc. The self hosted is totally different, I couldn't even get a template to load let alone anything else! So could someone give me some direction, an HONEST opinion of SBI, anything! I know absolutely nothing about seo, keywords, etc.
THANK YOU

 

[Linda Buquet]

Welcome and thanks for the kind words. Glad you like the forum

Once you have Wordpress set up it's as easy as can be. But setting it up RIGHT and getting all the right plugins and settings takes some knowledge. I'm an old pro and I don't even do it myself I contract set up to someone else.

So if you can afford to hire someone to do it right it will save you time and ensure everything is set up properly. That would be my #1 choice.

I admit I'm biased though. My 5 Star blog ranks #1 our of 213,000,000 competiing pages and gets around 2000 visits PER DAY. I feel like I owe most of the success to WP.

If you need not just a site but a system to follow, training and on-going support then I think SBI is good. But typically when you get into a proprietary system you eventually can face limitations.

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

I understand your frustration. I'm an old dog, hard to learn new tricks sometimes, did all of my first sites with PHP and had the hardest time catching on to WP. Now that I have I will never use anything else. One, it's free! Two, there are so many free ad ons and plug ins and templates. But Linda is right, you do need to set them up right for proper SEO.

Hang in there, the learning curve is steep, but it's not very far to the top.

 

[Night Stars]

Thank you for your speedy responses! Still researching.....so much information, the more I read the more confusing it gets. I am leaning towards SBI, I feel like it would be a starting point so I would at least be doing something instead of just thinking about doing something I know it has it's limitations but I hope to learn from it so that in the future I could 'do it' on my own.

 

[Ron Bechdolt]

One other thing to consider. Wordpress is the leader in probably all new sites coming out. It will be around for years and their are hundreds of support forums out there, people eager to help you with your questions and problems. Can you say the same for SBI? Given the choice, I'd want something that has lots of free resources and guaranteed longevity.

 

[rojkoserghei]

If you know nothing about SEO best addressed by a qualified ... But you can make comments on blogs ...