Eric S Website Design, MVP and Web Hosting

TLDR; WordPress.

If you use a VPS or cloud hosting, with OpenLiteSpeed and Oxygen Builder, you can create a custom website that loads very very quickly, has great SEO (though you can use RankMath).

A lot of people think wordpress is slow or bad becuase they often see it on shared hosting bogged down with bloated plugins. This doesn't have to be the case. I have made and seen sites load very fast, with photos etc.
You can also use Custom Fields and Custom Post Types to fully customise your pages, categories and apperance as well as improve backend management.

I use a Lindode VPS, and they have a one-click WP install (though I don't use that), I use CyberPanel (free cPanel) and OLS as mentioned. There is also Closte which run OLS on google cloud, and many other excellent providers. What you choose ultimitley depends on how many users you expect.

Some of the biggest and busiest websites run on WordPress, for exmaple:
TechCrunch.
The New Yorker.
BBC America.
Bloomberg Professional.

They all rely on CDNs, that will be your best weapon if you have hundreds of thousands of visitors or more.

WordPress can both be set-up quickly and managed and improved in the long run.

The only people not using it are nay-sayer hipsters or big companies who both have the time (and knowledge) to make something custom. If you're a small-medium buinesses, then just use WordPress, at least to start with.

But I will say, Oxygen Builder will make your life much easier and it isn't bloated and won't slow down your page(s), it can achieve "349 millisecond load times" and that's without the OLS cache.

Don't forget to compress images and serve them from a CDN as well, makes a huge difference.

Good luck!

Hi,

You can start with WordPress or another CMS if you want to build the 3rd party payment integration in PHP. You can use a WaaS to create the white label website builder and add your own PG via WooCommerce.

https://www.ecwid.com/partners/white-label has a white label service and has a lot of integrations, or perhaps this: https://simvoly.com/whitelabel-website-builder

Though to be fair the first option has hundreds of payment plugins though Woo, so unless it's your own crypto, you might find there is one already available for your payment gateway.
https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/payment-gateways/

If you want any further information or help on your project, please get in contact and I'd be happy to try and find a solution with you.

Hi,

Yes WP Multisite if you want separate sites per person (i.e. per profile), but if you basically want a Membership/ listing site, like AirBnB with profiles, there are a few good ways to do this. The main one is to use custom fields on a dashboard so the users can easily change their profile, colours etc. without much effort.

I was going to do something similar called ArtBnB with which artists can go and stay places (with other artists), I think it was a concept by a Finnish artist. I didn't do it in the end, but to try and help you get your head around this;
Wether you want to create a niche microsite that your users pay for each month i.e. a nihce blog, a full online service, or a listing site for whatever concept you have, that sends you a percentage of the payment when rented (via Stripe), there is absolutley a way to do it, and without paying ridiculous monthly fees.

Please do contact me if you would like to have a further discussion or potentially I can work with you, to help make your project work. I have experience in this, and an unlimited license for a particular WaaS software that I think would help if you want to do what I am imagining.

Try https://tawk.to they have real chat agents that work on multiple sites at once, so you can have them manage your chat from about $2/hr (per website, not per person) - or if you want something automated try https://www.tensorflow.org/ (free)

There's also https://www.fiverr.com/categories/business/virtual-assistant-services/administration

Hope that's of use to you :)

My first thought would be look at Facebook Marketing and really target those adverts to people who are maybe part of certain groups or in certain areas if you need them to be local. FB marketing can start from as little as £1 a day so it's a good place to try and see what happens even if you only use it for a few months.

The other thing you can do is sell any pre-made items, or make some bulk items and sell them on Etsy or Facebook to boost your reach and as people share them you should generate more interest.

You can also search twitter by topic and location to see if they need custom items made, like those who tweet about needing a silver wedding gift or something.
To do this you can use https://twitter.com/search-advanced

If you need any further info or advice, are looking for a custom mobile app, or need software or services setup or data automated (e.g. get a notification when you get a specific type of order, custom emails etc. etc.) I'd be happy to help.

Hi,

There wasn't much specifics beyond PR, is this about providing better customer relations?

If you're looking for a chat kind-of platform this one is free and you can host it yourself:
https://chaskiq.io/
It's marketed as "Conversational pipelines for Sales, Support and Marketing"

There is also https://www.chatwoot.com/ which is also free but not as feature-rich but I did try it as well

There's also https://www.mautic.org/ which is marketing automation.

I hope that helps, if you want to get any of those setup and running on your own server or cloud servers, and under your own domain. If you need further help or advice, or help setting this up, please contact me as it's something I have experience with.

Hi,

You could use something like a Website as a Service (WaaS) that allows you to create a platform that users can sign up to and pay you monthly for a service. You just need a domain name (example.com) and then users would get a subdomain (user.example.com) or they can register their own domain which you can also make profit on.

I would imagine a simple sign up process and a dashboard that allows your users to either use basic drag and drop tools or simply a form if you're going to do that for them. It basically sounds like a mini-website or a one-page site which is perfectly doable with WaaS using WordPress on a VPS or Cloud Computing, which can help with expansion when needed. There are other alternatives as well but this one is open source and allows you to easily accept payments for their service.

You can eventually add features to the service like private content and even allow your customers to add external content like Instagram/ Twitter. There are thousands of possibilities.

Do let me know if you need further help or advice, or help setting this up, as it's something I have experience with.

I know these aren't open source, but don't forget that Startups.com has https://www.launchrock.com/ which is basically what you are offering and you could create a form then create it for them, that way you are providing a design service that you can choose what to charge, rather than providing the entire platform. https://simvoly.com/whitelabel-website-builder is a white label drag and drop builder that you can launch as a service to your customers.