Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I`m looking to start a membership site and my question is: Should I trudge through trying to put all the pieces together myself, reducint my monthly costs, but maybe spending more time and frustration to get it all working together, or go with a company that seems to have all the pieces I need immediately, but then I incur a monthly/yearly cost and would be at their mercy if they don`t make it.

 

Thanks,

Christina Harris

Unless you can do it yourself (have the capability and knowledge), I would suggest hiring someone. The bottom line is how is your time best spent? Learning how to create a site or managing, promoting, and growing your business.

 

You suggest that your only option is to pay monthly fees while either you or another creates your site... but that`s not your only option.

 

Your site could be generated on another domain (sub-domain of the designer) and when ready move to your domain and hosting. However, it is a good idea to register your domain (for a few years) even if it is to park it while the site`s being completed. Also, your monthly hosting fee should be minimal at first because there is little server space required or bandwidth used.

 

Finally, your concern about being at the mercy of the design company. That can be mitigated with an agreement with time line that specifies "deliverables" by the designer and you. Plus, you certainly should not pay in full for anything until all the deliverables have been completed.

 

Depending upon your membership site needs, there are many scripts already written that may be used which can reduce the amount of custom programing needed.... and thus save the designer and you time and $$.

 

~Roland

Are you planning to start an Affiliate Program to compliment your membership site?  If so you will also want to consider either a membership service or software that can track your affiliate sales and pay out affiliate commissions.  With a membership site it is common to offer your affiliates recurring payments, in other words they get paid every month that the member they recruited remains subscribed to your site.  This is actually the only missing component in my design, I`m working on it as I write this so hopefully by tomorrow it will be done!

When I evaluated Membership site software at the beginning of my project I was impressed by AMember  Although I elected to use an open-source design it might be worth a look, it has impressive features and a good reputation.

Another thing I considered was to use PayDotCom or ClickBank as the front end for my membership site.  PayDotCom is appealing as it is free (ClickBank has a 50 dollar startup fee) and it pays instantly via PayPal (ClickBank holds payments for 60 days).  Both services will market your site to the thousands of affiliates they have signed under them.  They also provide the ability to take a variety of payment formats.

Good luck with your site, please let me know what you decide to do and if I can be of any additional assistance.

Bill

Bill and Roland, thanks for the replies.  I guess I should give a little more background to this.  I have a domain name setup, a site all but put together on joomla infrastructure and I have purchased a module that can handle the subscription portion.  I have been working on it for about 2 1/2 weeks now and have it mostly put together.  However, it`s just the back end stuff.  I still need to put the content together for the site. 
On the flip side, I was reviewing subhub.com`s membership package and was pretty impressed with how easy and quick you can get all these things in one combination to start the membership site, but again, they have monthly/yearly costs vs once I get the backend together, my site will be mine.  I have technical background so it`s not difficult to do, but I feel like I should be farther along and there began the second guessing.  It probably all goes back to add quite a bit more time to your plans of getting anything accomplished because there are always outside factors that make things take longer than they need to.

 

So, would you say don`t worry so much about how much time it takes as long as you get a solid site together that you can call your own, because in the end it isn`t a sprint to the finish? 

 

Christina

Thank you for your situation.  As you have already assembled the site and obviously have the technical skills I`m curious as to why you want to outsource this?

Roland does make a very valuable point when he recommends outsourcing so that it frees up your time to work on site content and marketing. And subhub`s rate works out to about 3 dollars a day, so it isn`t all that expensive.  But (and I`m only saying this based upon the impression I got from their website) this service seems to be targeted to those without the technical skills that you already possess.  And you still will need to create content for your site regardless whom you choose to host and manage it.

I `m in a similar situation with my site, and as I stated earlier I elected to do it all myself.  I feel that in the long run I will have complete control of the site and that it will put me in a better position if/when I want to expand upon it. In my case there is also a custom MySQL database and PHP front-end that is the main selling feature of the site, so hosting and managing  it elsewhere would be difficult.

You might want to consider future expansion before you commit to an external service.  I`m not sure what niche your site falls into but is it possible that you may want to add custom scripts or a unique design in the near future?  When i want to do that I work out the code on my test server (I setup an Ubuntu LINUX box with Apache and parallel my site development on it) and then apply it to the production server when I have the bugs worked out.  Is this even feasible with subhub?

Whatever you decide I wish you the best of success with your membership site.  I`m also curious as to which version (1.0 or 1.5) of Joomla you are using and what membership component you chose - I have spent a lot of time working with a similar setup myself (Joomla 1.0.15 with AEC, JACL and Community Builder).  I`d be interested to find out how you approached this.

Bill

Hi Bill,

 

The idea of having an all in one solution came with the efficiency of time.  I got my idea for a member site and I wanted to get it up and running as quickly as possible.  With Subhub, the only time it would take would be to get the content together.  Then I started looking at that business model and how I would be at the mercy of Subhub success for my site.  Also, the modules that are already there can be a drawback as well, they can offer several things, but as you stated, what about in the future?  I would be stuck.  Then I started realizing that I could probably put this thing together myself and then just add whatever modules I needed. 

 

As I started putting it all together, I use Joomla 1.5 and have added a few different extensions.  Probably the spot where I started to worry was when I was spending my day only setting up the technical backend stuff and I began to wonder when I would get the time to make the content part that will sell to members.  I don`t need a lovely site that can do all these things, but where I don`t have time to update the content- the reason the visitors become members.  I`ve also been using Google Adwords and aweber to develop a list why it`s under construction.  It a crude one page html telling them to sign up if they would like to be informed when the site is up and running.  I`ve gotten a fairly decent response, but google adwords isn`t free, but I think it`s helping me in two ways: one I should have a list of people interested from day one, and two, knowing that they are interested is driving me to complete it as soon as I can.  This also builds pressure probably.

 

As far as the technical aspects. I have Joomla 1.5 and I went with Joomsuite Member.  I researched amember and I liked it, but it`s not native to Joomla, it just has a plugin to work with it and I was concerned that it wouldn`t do as well as something made just for Joomla.  I also tried looking at AEC, but that isn`t free anymore and you have to pay even before you test it out, so I wasn`t a fan of that.

 

The more I`ve talked through this, but happier I am with going on my own with it.  That`s probably why this site is so awesome.  Anytime I asked my friends these questions, I got a glazed over look from them wondering what language I was speaking.  It`s great to talk with others who have had to go through a similar decision process for their budding business.

 

Thanks for that.