How To Pick A Niche Site Framework
By: John Elder posted in Niche Adsense Sites
Building Niche Adsense Websites…Part 4
Hello good people!
Another pretty good, but frigidly cold weekend here in Chicago. The city’s gearing up for the big Nato summit next month. My girlfriends building issued a memo suggesting residents stay inside for the whole week to avoid the protesters! Crazy!
Today we’re going to kick it into semi-practical gear and talk about site framework. Tomorrow I’ll start actually building the web site, but today I want to talk about options.
I should mention that I’ve decided on a niche for our example website. Drumroll please…. Radio Controlled Airplanes (or RC Airplanes). I’ve worked in this niche before. It’s not spectacular, there’s decent search traffic to be had but not a whole lot of advertisers.
We should expect to make only a couple dollars a day (if that) in advertising in this niche. But it’s a good niche to explain several different things like taping into people’s hobbies, etc so I thought it would be a good example website.
Still haven’t picked a domain, will probably do that today.
You have lots of options when it comes to building a web site. You can go with the traditional WordPress install, or you can build your own site using html, css, and a little php.
I choose to build my own, and if you’ve been reading my blog for a while – you know why.
It gives you a level of customization that’s amazing, and allows you to do all kinds of tricky things with php that are a lot harder (though not necessarily impossible) to do with wordpress.
Not to mention the fact that wordpress is a resource HOG. It takes a lot of web server space to install, requires extensive database usage, and sucks memory like crazy. None of that matters if you’re just building a few sites, but if you want to build hundreds or thousands of sites, wordpress can VERY QUICKLY increase your webhosting costs substantially.
So if you’re following along with my example site and want to use wordpress and try to hack it up to do some of the things I’ll be doing — feel free. In fact some day I might release some wordpress themes to make things easier. But for now I highly recommend building your sites by hand using simple html, css, and php.
You don’t have to hand code everything. You can use a framework. In fact, recently I’ve been using one and I’m going to recommend it to you right now…it’s called:
Bootstrap was built by a couple guys at Twitter, and it’s a simple CSS driven framework that makes it easy to crank out websites using a sort of starter template.
Bootstrap comes with three main templates, and we’re going to be using the Fluid template, and you can click the link there to see what the site is basically going to look like.
Of course, we’re going to customize the template to make it look exactly like we want it to. But you’ll get the basic layout idea.
Check out This Site to see examples of popular web sites that were built with bootstrap.
Bootstrap is pretty simple to use if you have any html and css experience. If you don’t, I suggest you spend a half an hour or so watching these Free Videos (scroll down a little to find the videos), followed by these videos and these videos. You can mess around and find other tutorials on your own as well.
Do we need to use a framework like bootstrap? No..but it does make things a little easier by providing us some solid CSS to begin building on.
Tomorrow I’ll start banging out the site. Should be fun.
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
