5 Types of Complex Websites That You Can Build With WordPress | EP 795

5 Types of Complex Websites That You Can Build With WordPress

1. Social Community (Buddypress, Peepso) 02:51
2. Forum (BBPress) 03:43
3. Online Course Site (LifterLMS, LearnDash) 04:27
4. Crowdfunding (WP Crowdfunding, GiveWP) 05:27
5. Membership Site (Restrict Content Pro, MemberPress) 07:27

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast i’m Tim Strifler and today we are talking about five types of complex websites that you can build with WordPress. Now obviously everyone knows you can build a blog with WordPress you can build a business website like for small businesses, like brochure style websites. And so forth everyone knows you can build e-commerce websites using Woocommerce and the other platforms out there. But um sometimes you might not be aware of everything that WordPress can do if you’ve never looked into and researched it and been faced with the task of building a type of website like this. And so i want to share five different types of complex websites this is by no means a complete list there’s all different types of complex things that can be accomplished with WordPress. And so um let’s go ahead and get started. The first one is a social community. Now i’m not suggesting that you should go out and try to build a competitor to Facebook or Twitter or Tik Tok or whatever with using WordPress. But if you want to have some sort of internal community some sort of of social network type of thing uh for for whatever website you have, you can do that on WordPress. And so for example you can use tools like Buddy Press or Peepso. Peepso uh is um probably more feature rich and it’ll allow you to build a social network with accounts and profiles and messaging and commenting and a feed and all those types of features. And so i’m actually shout out to uh Justin who’s a friend of uh of the podcast.  He has WPhub.social uh definitely check it out, if you haven’t already. And i believe he uses Peepso to power uh his social community that’s for WordPress web designers specifically. So definitely go and check out wphub.social. So the first one is social community, the second one is a forum. Now forums definitely aren’t as popular as they were in the early days of the internet, but a forum is basically uh they’re usually like niche focused uh within different industries and it’s just a place to do posts and have people comment on the posts and stuff. And typically use for some sort of help forum and so you can actually build a forum website using WordPress. And so you can use Bbpress which is by automatic the founders of WordPress. And Bbpress will power your forum on WordPress, and so i built a site it was for um a company uh that led uh surrogacy for parents who could have kids biologically and so they built a forum to help people answer questions and get help for everything. All the different things that go on with that there’s adoption forums and there’s car forums there’s gamer for their forums in every single topic you can imagine WordPress forums. So forums can be really really powerful and so you can do that using WordPress. Bbpress there’s probably others now too but i’ve used Bbpress and it was it was great so this one is probably a little more common. Uh and that’s an online course site. So no surprise there you can use tools like lift or lms or learn dash and there’s other ones too. Those are the big two i recommend Lifter lms you can actually get started for free and then you just pay for the extensions that you need so you can build an awesome online course site using Lifter lms and Learndash. So the next one this one is probably a little lesser known and that’s a crowdfunding site. So you can actually create a website similar to like Kickstarter or Indiegogo where you’re having crowdfunding. Again if you’re going to try to create a site that actually competes with those companies you might want to raise some money and get a team of developers to build something custom, but if you’re doing something maybe for a niche something very specific to create type of of crowdfunding campaigns um you can do that on WordPress. There’s tools like WP Crowdfunding also give WP which is mainly focused on donations and stuff, but they have features that kind of simulate that crowdfunding type of thing so that can be powerful too. And then the last type of complex website that you can build with WordPress is a membership site. Now this is similar to like an online course site, but online course sites while they do have membership features everything is kind of geared more towards education and learning and that whole experience but you can build strictly a membership website using tools like restrict content pro or member press and they have everything that you need to have. Members only content and create sort of like a club experience where members can log in and get access to different types of exclusive members content. That isn’t necessarily an online course or education focus type of thing. And so um you can build membership sites with WordPress, so super super powerful. Now i do want to kind of end the episode with saying just because you can do those things with WordPress doesn’t mean you always should, so sometimes there’s things that you can do uh that maybe you don’t need to necessarily do in within WordPress, and you can save a lot of time and effort by using a pre-made solution that’s not on WordPress. For example for like a social community you can use something like uh circle. Uh circles are really popular um gaining a lot of popularity for creating a online community well they already have all everything built out and you don’t need to go and build it yourself on WordPress and so that can save you a lot of time you won’t have quite as much control, but it’ll make things a lot easier and then online course site i mean yeah you can go and host a course on teachable or udemy that one i’d probably recommend sticking with WordPress and then crowdfunding if you need to do crowdfunding. You don’t have to build it yourself you can use other crowdfunding platforms out there so just a couple things like that i wanted to mention that just because you can do some everything with WordPress doesn’t mean you always should, or doesn’t mean that it’s always the smartest choice for the amount of effort and time resources. All that that’s going to go into it so i just wanted to end with that. So that is the end of this episode tune in tomorrow we’re going to talk about the WordPress seo plug-in basics that you should know. So super important episode tomorrow, until then take care bye-bye.