I know you're here because you already know that WordPress is a great option to power your new website. But before we dive in, I want to talk about the alternatives because there actually are a bunch of really solid options for you out there, and WordPress is one of them, but it's not the only option. Now, this may be a little bit different from what you hear from the typical developer because what most kind of hire by the hour coder and designer and developers are gonna tell you is, "Hey I happen to specialize in software X, Y, and Z, and by the way, that also happens to be the best possible solution for you." So whenever you talk to somebody you're gonna realize that a lot of them are basically working backwards from "Hey I know WordPress," to "Hey you should use WordPress." I wanna do the exact opposite here, and basically present the options to you and tell you why WordPress might not be the best solution for you. Because I want to make sure you're doing the right thing at this stage of your business cycle and your business growth. And not wasting time and money on things that are kind of overkill for what you need. So today I'm gonna present two slightly less advanced options because in some cases they might actually be better for you right now. First and foremost, none of the options here are free. We've talked a little bit about this in the intro to the WordPress Without a Developer course. WordPress is often sold as free. But it's really not, there's gonna be costs associated with hosting, associated with buying some themes or plugins, so you really wanna go into this with the understanding that you need a budget no matter what. Whether that's gonna be, you know, $10, or $20, or $50 a month, or a few hundred dollars up front, or you know, thousands of dollars up front to hire a developer, is really gonna be up to you and it's something I'm gonna kind of help you figure out as part of this course. But just realize going into this that none of the options are free, and because we're talking about a relatively small investments like $15 a month, they're all pretty much gonna be easily interchangeable for your purposes. You know, they're not, you're not comparing $10 a month to $10,000 per month or something like that, so for our purposes, you really wanna have a budget for your business and you want to invest in something no matter what you do, but choose which investment is right for you. So the first one I wanna talk about is Squarespace. Squarespace is essentially an all in one solution that allows you to sign up, buy a dot com domain, if you want it. Basically plug and play build a website. It's very slick and simple. You can see that the designs are really nice. There are some drag and drop components of it, although I think anytime you see drag and drop, including in WordPress, it's kind of a mirage. Like it's not as easy as they make it out to be. But the bottom line is that you can get a pretty good website going on Squarespace for something like 10 to 20 dollars per month. Do it yourself with drag and drop and basically have one or two pages that are really solid. So this kind of could accomplish the business card goal that we talked about earlier. And there's really no reason for you to not do this if that's all you need. Usually what we see is people bump into issues with Squarespace when they want more ownership and control behind the scenes. So if you're saying to yourself, "You know, I basically want a blog, but I also wanna do this thing," that's immediately gonna kinda bump you out of the world of Squarespace because you know they have a lot of features but ultimately there's not a lot of opportunity to get in there and say "I want it to be like this." You're picking from an available list of options and features. You're turning them on or off. You're choosing a design, and that will get you a pretty long way, but it won't do everything for you. So usually with Squarespace people like it if they just need something super simple, but they start to get frustrated with it if they want more control, or they see themselves wanting more control, you know, a few months down the line. Shopify is another great system. Again, like Squarespace, it's kind of a closed system. So you don't have a ton of control. Technically you could get under the hood, but you basically need to hire a developer for that which can get kind of costly and frustrating pretty quickly. Shopify is entirely for retail sales. They'll probably tell you you could do other things with it, but for our purposes, it's really for, I have a physical product, I wanna sell it, I wanna ship it, I wanna charge somebody's credit card, and basically have a way to have their address printed out and ship it out. It's really really good for that, and you can basically start doing that overnight if you want to. And plans start kind of in the 20's to 30's per month, maybe a little cheaper. They have payment processing that's built in, or you can use separate payment processors if you want to. So basically they are a really good, simple, start-to-finish retail system. However, they're very limited for everything else. So I've had clients, you know, sort of on the higher end of budgets come to me and say, "We've been on Shopify for a few years, we really wanna like build our brand and do more with it, and we just can't, in this system." So we see if people grow out of Shopify if they wanna do more, or if they wanna have like a really really big complex store, it can get too expensive to do that with Shopify, and it actually might make sense to invest in your own site. But if you're just selling one or two things, Shopify is a great solution so I would recommend checking it out because it's gonna be a little bit faster for you than building your own WordPress site. If neither of those two things appeals to you, or you see yourself wanting more control and flexibility in the long term, then WordPress is probably a great fit for you. Basically, if you listened to what I just said and it's kind of obvious that you want something more, or that you're probably gonna outgrow Squarespace or Shopify in a matter of a few months, you should start with WordPress. If not, you may wanna start with Squarespace or Shopify, and put WordPress on hold for six months or a year until you prove that you need it. By the way, this is what the other developers don't tell you, and this is why I put this in the initial free lessons. I actually don't want you to invest in the WordPress Without a Developer course unless it's clear to you that there's value in learning WordPress. Because it does take some time, there is an investment. As I said, there's an investment in all these, and there's a learning curve in all these. But if you can get away with Squarespace and Shopify for today, they're usually gonna be net cheaper for you. But you're also gonna bump your head into constraints more quickly. So that's kinda the big question for you, is do you want to just go with something that's super simple but constraining? Or do you wanna take the time and energy to set up a WordPress site which gives you a lot more room to grow, and makes you far less likely to need to switch in the future?