Planning to start a new side project - Unsure about whether I should just use WP or PHP

Hello,

I'm planning to start a new website. Unlike most of what I've done up to date, my intention is to target a wide variety of keywords by the [probable, unsure about this] usage of a city in the subdomain. ie.:[city].find[keyword].com
I would consider this to be a long-term project, aimed to provide me stable income in 1-2 years' time.

My problem is as follows: most of the websites I've done up to date have been either using Magento/Wordpress or 'hard' coded static websites, which only required HTML/CSS. I've never learned/made a website with 'coded' PHP.

Since I want to dedicate about 30-40% of my time into this project over the course of a year+, I want to make the website worthwhile.

Questions:
1. I am unsure about whether I should just use WordPress or learn PHP. Perhaps finding a pre-made PHP template, downloading/paying for it, editing the CSS and leaving the PHP in would work? As I said, I'm unsure about this. I dislike how little flexibility WordPress offers when compared to 'hard' coding, but I would like having a database-powered website. The idea I came up with is sort of related to the idea of ranking sites for 'dentist [city]' and selling 3-5 ad slots for money. The niche I am interested in, however, is less competitive than dentistry so I cannot ask that much for having the ads up.

I want to be able to update the websites easily. For instance, I would want to be able to add a Google +1 button to all the pages of my site with relative ease. Since the only variable in 90% of my pages is the content, I would also want to be able to add additional pages with ease, without having a headache with the menus and whatnot.

2. Taking into account that the domain is find[keyword].com: I would want to start off with easier keywords, build up authority in the general niche and then use said authority to rank the tougher keywords. Would using subdomains be a wise choice? I'm asking because I believe a subdomain counts as a 'site' inside a site and, since in my case the only thing that changes is the city, perhaps it would be better to stick with domain.com/[keyword][city] or domain.com/[city]. Unsure about this, too.

Would appreciate any related income/tips/advice on the matter.

Thanks in advance.

Even you want to dedicate all your time to this project still it is not wise to learn PhP only for one project. If you want to make database driven website then you will have to get mastery over PhP, database like Mysql and Javascript (as you told you already know HTML and CSS). I think your whole year will be finished in learning.

It is always good to buy tube-light from market unless you want to put a factory of tube-light. So for one site it is good to have knowledge of PhP, javascript but mastery of these scripts take time and IMO for one website it is better to seek help from already established programmer. It will save a lot of time and time is money.

BTW I am a PhP programmer.

Regards

WP is very flexible.. just get WPmu and slap it onto all your subdomains.

I would stick to one domain and have the cities as the categories (i.e. findkw.com/city/morekw) - get some proper interlinking and long term, it'll do better.

Additionally, it will be easier to sell links... there is definitely a plugin that can show different messages depending on the category (if not, its easily coded). wordpress also gives you a lot of built in functionality and seo friendly plugins that would cost too much time/money to develop from scratch.

PHP and HTML sites has shown great success compared to WP blogs, i think google has given more power for PHP and HTML cause WP is mostly used by autoblogs and other sady businesses... all SEO plugins for WP, google dont like cheaters

kirkonpolttaja said:

PHP and HTML sites has shown great success compared to WP blogs, i think google has given more power for PHP and HTML cause WP is mostly used by autoblogs and other sady businesses... all SEO plugins for WP, google dont like cheaters

Click to expand...

where did you get this info from?

piranh said:

Even you want to dedicate all your time to this project still it is not wise to learn PhP only for one project. If you want to make database driven website then you will have to get mastery over PhP, database like Mysql and Javascript (as you told you already know HTML and CSS). I think your whole year will be finished in learning.

It is always good to buy tube-light from market unless you want to put a factory of tube-light. So for one site it is good to have knowledge of PhP, javascript but mastery of these scripts take time and IMO for one website it is better to seek help from already established programmer. It will save a lot of time and time is money.

BTW I am a PhP programmer.

Regards

Click to expand...

Once I have learned PHP I'd obviously be able to apply it for other sites, so it's not as if I would only use it in this one. However, since I don't have much time to learn/fuck around, it might not be that great of an idea.

WP is very flexible.. just get WPmu and slap it onto all your subdomains.

I would stick to one domain and have the cities as the categories (i.e. findkw.com/city/morekw) - get some proper interlinking and long term, it'll do better.

Additionally, it will be easier to sell links... there is definitely a plugin that can show different messages depending on the category (if not, its easily coded). wordpress also gives you a lot of built in functionality and seo friendly plugins that would cost too much time/money to develop from scratch.

Click to expand...

Admittedly I probably haven't experienced the 'full' potential of WP, but it still does offer limitations. I will take a closer look into it, though. There's a bunch of features which I know for sure can't be done with WP, but using WP over PHP would save me many hours.

Strondahl said:

Admittedly I probably haven't experienced the 'full' potential of WP, but it still does offer limitations. I will take a closer look into it, though. There's a bunch of features which I know for sure can't be done with WP, but using WP over PHP would save me many hours.

Click to expand...

WP is php based... you can customize it any way you would a regular php site. From what you plan on doing, wp seems to cover all your needs without much hassle.

Reefer said:

where did you get this info from?

Click to expand...

From my personal experience.

I made WP site which i have been filling week-by-week with unique selfwritten articles, got platinum SEO plugin on the site, but i made 2 subdomains under it which were PHP/HTML, they have gained PR2 in WAY shorter time than WP site has been up and WP site is still PR0.

PHP and HTML is must cleaner in my opinion, faster and more simple than WP sourcecode. Google gives alot credit for simple sites with great loading time.

This is my personal experience

EDIT: and yes i know WP is PHP but "footprint" aint same, you can see clearly which one is blog platform and which is not.

Before taking a decision I need to experience the 'full' potential of WordPress. What would you guys recommend for this?

as Reefer said.. wp is made in PHP.. there is no limitations. you can code something new or change whatever you want in php. it's limitless. plus there's a lot more people familiar with wordpress so if you aren't sure how to code something you can probably find someone easier that can code something to addon to your site if you can't find a plugin from the 1000s that are available.

honestly starting out with wordpress is a good idea because you aren't starting from scratch. I was working on a site where I used a minibb (forum software) and had a user database built around the minibbs forum and changed it up some plus added a lot more functions. It's just a lot easier so you aren't starting from complete scratch.

kirkonpolttaja said:

From my personal experience.

I made WP site which i have been filling week-by-week with unique selfwritten articles, got platinum SEO plugin on the site, but i made 2 subdomains under it which were PHP/HTML, they have gained PR2 in WAY shorter time than WP site has been up and WP site is still PR0.

PHP and HTML is must cleaner in my opinion, faster and more simple than WP sourcecode. Google gives alot credit for simple sites with great loading time.

This is my personal experience

EDIT: and yes i know WP is PHP but "footprint" aint same, you can see clearly which one is blog platform and which is not.

Click to expand...

if you code the site correctly, yes it would be slightly faster.. is it worth missing out on the rss feeds, commenting system, plugin management, article management, and all the other goodies that come with it? dont think so.

i dont think google penalizes sites just for using wp... i can see your logic but it would be such a broad generalization that would hurt many legit sites.

Reefer said:

if you code the site correctly, yes it would be slightly faster.. is it worth missing out on the rss feeds, commenting system, plugin management, article management, and all the other goodies that come with it? dont think so.

i dont think google penalizes sites just for using wp... i can see your logic but it would be such a broad generalization that would hurt many legit sites.

Click to expand...

Yes commenting system and stuff like that are really top notch, 0.05s added to loading time is nothing if you cant get those features.

But i dont need them, i usually make sites that offer information but i dont allow commenting, so those are useless to me only thing that i would need is that article management, but i have time for doing it the slow way.

Maybe there might be negative footprint in SEO related plugins(?), dont know... i have to investigate my WP site more and get more clues what would make PR stay so low even if i have over 100 self written articles on it.

if you don't want the commenting system you can remove it from the php in your theme page.php, archive.php, and index.php so it doesn't even load it.

I feel at ease with Wordpress, all my outsourced micro sites are wordpress based and they have very easy interface to add new articles and plugins are abundant.

For sure wordpress is also coded in PHP but, as I am also a PhP programmer, it is not a very good example of PhP scripting. If we learn PHP for sure we will be able to code much cleaner as Vbulletin. Vbulletin is a nice example of how to code in PhP. To get some good professional juice quickly from PhP you will have to use Zend Framework which is not free yet. Rubby on rail can be a good choice also if you really want to develop website yourself. It is easy to learn and with Rail framework it is easy to use and will save a lot of coding time. Few moths you will be making professional websites. Havin knowledge of scripting language for sure will give you edge over wordpdress but it depends if you really need something which wordpress do not provide or you think there should be some improvement (as I told there are lot of chances to make much clear code).

And by using curl library in PHP we can also make useful boats which can make various repeated monotonous task easy. I am not aware about the Bot making capability of Rubby yet.

As far as google is concern, I do not think it is matter WordPress itself is written in PhP and PhP is server side language not client side. In client you will get only the output which will be in plain HTML.

Regards

Would still appreciate any income on this.