A Mogul To Be

Tools for building your niche site

September 16th, 2007 by Robert

So you’ve decided to take the plunge and try a few niche sites and you are not sure how to actually go about building them. Thankfully there are some options depending on the type of site you want to build.

Quick, basic site

By Hand

If you want to build something quickly or a ‘quick hit’ type of site there are two good options. The first is to just hand code it in HTML. It isn’t all that hard and there are quite a variety of tutorials out there. This is a decent option if you are planning on only a few pages.

Wordpress

There is however a better option in my opinion and that is Wordpress. Yes it is a blogging tool, but it makes an excellent platform for a niche site. It has many built in features that are ideal for a niche site.

No HTML

The first is that you don’t have to know HTML of course. It makes it pretty easy to add content and that speeds up your deployment time.

Plugins

This is one of the beauties of Wordpress, the plugins. There are quite a few plugins that will aid the niche site builder. From SEO plugins, sitemap tools, etc. I will cover these plugins in detail in a later post.

Content Management Systems

If you are looking for a site that is more than some simple pages, like say a fantasy sports site, then you need a Content Management System. A CMS is a piece of software that allows you to build a site and depending on the CMS allows you to do more complex features.

Yes, Wordpress could technically be called a CMS, but when you mention CMS most think of tools like Joomla!, Drupal and others. These software packages are free to use –being open source– and while a little more difficult to setup and use than Wordpress they offer greater flexibility in how to use the content. For Rototown.com for example, we’ve added a forum, polls, etc. Like Wordpress, Joomla! has quite a few plugins available to customize it and one of the most popular ones is called Community Builder.

In Summary

The nice thing with the various software packages is that most hosting companies offer them to be installed from their control panels. The most common control panel is cPanel and they offer 11 different CMS solutions and four different kinds of blog solutions, at least the one from Site5 does (my hosting provider).

I’ll cover hosting these sites in my next installment of niche sites.

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