Whats Your Favorite Website Builder?

[rievandesign]

It is true, WordPress tends to be the most common framework for a quick insurance site. Some of the templates or themes are very light weight. There are some amazing plug ins for squeeze pages as well as quote engines that make these sites very flexible.

A simple WordPress site can be built for around $200 to $250 with very little work and still produce a great web presence. But again, if you are driving 1,000 to 50,000 clicks a day trying to get leads, WordPress is typically not the best rout to go.

I have many programmers that work for me and they are all hungry for work. Please let me know if there is anything any here needs in the way of conversions and or site creation.

 

[Damion]

But again, if you are driving 1,000 to 50,000 clicks a day trying to get leads, WordPress is typically not the best rout to go.

What is your basis for this?
I have Wordpress sites that are getting a million+ pageviews per day, generate thousands of leads per day, and have no problem with them. If you are having issues, you need to upgrade your hosting. Wordpress, in and of itself, is perfectly capable of handling the traffic and that is why many top sites online use it.

If you are having problems supporting the load, a better server, a good caching program (WP Super Cache is still free, I believe, if you don't want to pay for a good caching plugin) and lead generation can be done very well with numerous commercially available plugins.

 

[rievandesign]

Damion, great reply and thank you for your incite. As I said in a previous post depending on what you would be using the site for greatly depends on the framework as well as the crm you require. WordPress, as you know, is built on a php framework requiring a MySQL database to drive most of it's content.

Now, for a simple site that is driving responsive css, html content 1mil + page views per day although impressive is quite different than 1mil + unique visitors interacting with various plug ins and filling and processing forms. This takes a toll on most simple hosting packages. In fact any simple hosting package will most likely fail without some type of load balancing or cdn in place.

For instance, currently I am the webmaster and lead programmer for a company called EnrollMyself.com. We are a WBE and currently run 4 separate servers which are all load balanced and can handle upwards of 20 million hits a day. I would never do this but let's say WordPress was the engine running our system. I would require 3 times the servers in order to serve the same exact pages. Keep in mind we still would have to run the engines and processes which quote and enroll people into the FFM.

This also brings up an important security issue which you run into with an open source platform such as WordPress. There are many, many safer frameworks like Nette or Zend that would do much better when driving paid traffic to a sales funnel capturing information.

We also need to look at a couple other important factors other than just your server. For instance, simple things like serving a VSL (video sales letter) can be the difference between converting clicks to leads. I would never serve my videos on the same server as my site. I would use a cdn (content delivery network) such as max cdn or even amazon e3. All of these little details play a roll in how I would assist someone in getting the correct site and system for their company. Which is not excluding WordPress.

I am just here giving advice I am not trying to sell anyone on any specific thing. What I am saying is, WordPress has it's place. I don't believe it's code-base or flexibility allows for traffic at the scale you are speaking about.
You may be able to get away with it, heck you can take a pontoon boat 200 miles off shore but I wouldn't recommend it. For a small company looking for some organic and light paid traffic, WordPress is easy so I would recommend it all day long.

If you are getting 1 million page views a day I would guess your paying some good money for your traffic. Or you have many many WordPress sites getting lots of organic traffic. If the second is true than you are in great shape and are 100% correct. Kudos on such a great network of awesome free traffic.

But if the first scenario is true than at even $.02 per click you are spending 20,000 a day. Why don't you have professional programmers building you independent responsive pages on a framework that is much lighter than WordPress? Other than the fact it may be taking you out of your comfort zone there are some much better alternatives when that much money is on the line. If your site goes down for even 15 minutes you've lost over 200 dollars at the 20,000 dollar per day mark.

 

[Damion]

But if the first scenario is true than at even $.02 per click you are spending 20,000 a day. Why don't you have professional programmers building you independent responsive pages on a framework that is much lighter than WordPress? Other than the fact it may be taking you out of your comfort zone there are some much better alternatives when that much money is on the line. If your site goes down for even 15 minutes you've lost over 200 dollars at the 20,000 dollar per day mark.

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

 

[Jbar]

is your site that's getting a million+ page views organic an insurance site? If so how many hours are you dedicating to social marketing and promotion of your site?

 

[Damion]

is your site that's getting a million+ page views organic an insurance site? If so how many hours are you dedicating to social marketing and promotion of your site?

No, It is a real estate website. In addition to my consulting firm, I also own a real estate brokerage. I am here learning more about insurance with the idea of opening an insurance company to integrate more services into each contact. I have a life/health license and am considering P&C after being contacted by a State Farm recruiter a couple of weeks ago.

I am just learning more about the business right now and pop my head in to these web forums to answer questions as my way of giving back to the community for answering my insurance questions.

 

[Jbar]

Got it, I'm in a similar situation got plenty of sales experience and spent the last 2 years doing selling seo/websites & online ads to attorneys now I've been licensed for a few months and I'm trying to implement some of my old skills in my new job field...

 

[Damion]

Got it, I'm in a similar situation got plenty of sales experience and spent the last 2 years doing selling seo/websites & online ads to attorneys now I've been licensed for a few months and I'm trying to implement some of my old skills in my new job field...

Congrats. Good luck to you.

 

[Jbar]

Thanks, good luck to you as well. If you haven't found a pretest company yet I recommend testeachers, not just because they are a sponsor but because I used them and within 6 weeks I passed my P&C and my L&D on the first attempt with mid 80's scores.

 

[Damion]

Thanks, good luck to you as well. If you haven't found a pretest company yet I recommend testeachers, not just because they are a sponsor but because I used them and within 6 weeks I passed my P&C and my L&D on the first attempt with mid 80's scores.

I will probably just use ExamFX. I used them for my Life/Health and was able to knock out the material over a weekend and take my test a few days later but thanks for the recommendation.