She wanted a website.
She was a gal that had wanted to be an author for years. And she'd worked hard on various versions of her script. She had worked tirelessly to find a publisher.
And eventually found one. And then the book editing had happened. She tried to stay as excited.
And then she was thrilled with the book cover design. And the printing.
And eventually the books were on shelves.
Now, all she needed was a website.
Instead, she had to make decisions.
You'd think, with how far we've come, that building a website would be the simplest part of the whole project, right?
I mean, you have tons of options for getting a site built – from design templates, to themes, to different content management systems (CMS) to choose from.
But all those options meant just as much paralysis as analysis. Because it meant she had to make a decision.
And honestly, how do you get started with those decisions:
- Shared hosting
- VPS hosting
- Managed hosting
- Cloud hosting
- Co-location hosting
Which one is right? And how do you know?
And even then, what should you pay? Should she spend $3/month, $10/month, $20/month, or $100/month?
Is it just a forgone conclusion that you get what you pay for? Should she just pay the most?
And is she paying for features? Security? Stability? Support?
She had no idea.
A lot of decisions.
But the choice between 5 hosting options wasn't her only decision. Each of those options had several companies offering plans to meet her needs.
And each of the companies had several plans – with different options for:
- Bandwidth
- Database support
- Hard drive space
- Computer speed
Are you counting the number of permutations she had in front of her yet?
And even more decisions.
When she finally picked a hosting approach, and a hosting provider, she wasn't done.
She needed to pick a CMS. She picked my favorite – WordPress.
But she wasn't done.
She needed to pick a theme store and a theme.
She needed to pick a plugin for social sharing.
She needed to pick a plugin for her contact forms.
She needed to pick a way to charge people for digital versions of her book (and she knew nothing about eCommerce).
Her publisher suggested an eCommerce approach, but it didn't even work with WordPress.
She was getting pretty frustrated.
And eventually she was done.
I don't mean done as in “all the decisions are over.” I mean done as in – “forget this.”
And would you blame her? Could I? No way.
The truth is, for as easy as WordPress is, there are still a lot of decisions people have to make. And frankly these are decisions that people who know nothing about WordPress have a seriously hard time making.
The end result can simply be a desire to “make it all stop.”
Her story ended sadly. But yours doesn't have to.
This is why I recommend people to consider Rainmaker.
Unfortunately for my friend the author, this was several years ago and Rainmaker didn't exist. These days she's moved on to other things because she wasn't really happy with her experience of website development.
She didn't want to become a webmaster. She had no interest becoming a developer. She had just wanted to be an author.
Today she's a masseuse.
Reasons for Rainmaker
There's a good chance you're not a web developer or software engineer.
There's an even better chance you have no desire to become one. And thankfully you don't need to be.
Rainmaker is a new platform that helps you build your own platform.
You want, if I'm right, influence. You want to develop an audience.
At least, if you're like me, you do.
I do a lot of public speaking. When I do, to my audience, I want my microphone to work, but honestly, I don't care about the technology that powers my microphone. I don't care about the tech standards the microphone cable meets. I just need it to work.
Rainmaker is a new platform that hides all the technical complexity.
Maybe the very best thing about Rainmaker is that it removes all the decisions you don't care about, to help you focus on the ones you do.
Maybe the very best thing about Rainmaker is that it gets you past the first forty decisions about hosting types, hosting providers, hosting plans, content management systems, themes and plugins.
Maybe the very best thing about Rainmaker is that it's easy to use.
I say maybe because there's one more thing that's worth knowing about Rainmaker. It's brought to you by Copyblogger. You know, the folks that have already taught you so much of what you know about creating information products, and writing copy on the web.
They've taken all their experience with product development (something I know a little about) and pulled it together to create a platform.
A platform that's easy to use, hides all it's technical complexity, and helps you build your own platform.
All she wanted was a website. Instead, she had problems.
Today I would send her to Rainmaker.