Rosina here. Happy weekend! I hope you’ve had a great day!
RosinaBignall.com got a serious facelift today!!
Go check it out and see for yourself.
I’m pretty happy with the results!
It’s not all done yet, in fact none of the links work yet, but the overall design of the homepage is pretty nice, in my humble opinion.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on it too!
And if you hate it… PLEASE TELL ME SO!
I’m as interested in negative feedback as positive feedback.
There’s still much to do – the footer hasn’t been fixed from the template yet, obviously there’s the links, and other pages need to be created or adjusted to fit the style.
But it was fun creating it :).
And it’s in wordpress… which brings me to why I am repenting of my decision to leave my wordpress sites and move to Clickfunnels.
I’ve used WordPress for a long time, so why would I even think of moving…
Well, WordPress does take work.
- You have to do the maintenance on the site yourself (or pay someone to do it).
So it seems like it would be nice to have that built in.
- There’s no dedicated support staff because it’s free software.
So when you run into a problem you have to search and find the solution yourself or ask in the many WordPress groups out there.
Now, you’re not likely to run into a problem that someone hasn’t had before, so the solution is most likely out there, it’s just a matter of finding it.
But it seems like it would be nice, and faster, to be able to ask a dedicated support staff and get an answer back fast, right?
- There’s so many options to choose from to accomplish anything that you do have to spend time researching possible alternative to decide which one is the right one for you for what you want to accomplish.
So it seems like it would be great to have everything made for you in the best way possible, right?
- Sometimes, to get exactly what you want, you have to resort to code to modify the way WordPress works by default.
Or you can pay someone to build what you need for you so that it can be integrated into WordPress properly.
So it seems like it would be good to not have to do that… Clickffunnels is there to provide the solutions for you, right?
So, to be honest the main thing that made me decide to move from WordPress was the work involved in maintaining and finding solutions.
I had a site (rosinabignall.com) that I had at one time set up as a multi-site to supposedly make the work easier. So that I could do the work on the network and it would apply to all my sites at once.
But turns out it wasn’t less work at all.
First of all, a network only consists of sub-domains not totally different domains… and I wanted it on totally different domains not subdomains.
So, I still had to maintain multiple installations.
Second, there are a lot of plugins that don’t work on muti-site installations, and when I ran into a problem, narrowing it down to that being the cause was a lot of work.
And then, if I really wanted that feature, I had to work with the developer to get them to fix it – something I don’t have the resources to do. And even if I did, not all the developers would be willing to actually solve the problem (well maybe they would if I paid them enough, but again there’s that resource problem).
And I kept bumping up on those problems. Aweber flat out told me they wouldn’t fix it ever for their plugin and I really wanted their plugin to be able to integrate with my lists at Aweber.
So I was stuck.
I could move back to a single site and not have to deal with those problems anymore…
But, I don’t even want to tell you the problems I ran into trying to do that!
It is NOT an easy task to move from a multi-site to a single site (it’s very easy to go the other way around).
So, when I made my decision, I was beating my head against these problems and I wanted out!
I’ve used Clickfunnels for some time to build funnels.
I have several sites built on it.
But in Clickfunnels Classic, you are limited to sales funnels and simple one course type membership sites.
There’s no functionality for building full sites with all the other things that make a good website.
So, with Classic, I had never really considered switching completely. I just used it for simple sites that didn’t require anything major and refer people to my WordPress sites for a full website experience
But I was playing with Clickfunnels 2.0 and it seemed like a good option.
It’s built to have what you need for a full website with many things built in that you have to use several plugins to do in WordPress, and you still get the funnels and courses all integrated (which you can also do in WordPress with the right combination of plugins).
And they have support available.
So I decided to bite the bullet and switch to Clickfunnels.
It would take work to move my sites, in fact I probably wouldn’t, I’d just leave them with their content live and just not add anything more to them – add the new stuff to sites on Clickfunnels.
And I started using the platform more and more.
I built Success Journey on it.
I asked many questions of their support, often difficult questions – the easy ones I could figure out for myself.
I learned more and more about their philosophy.
I tried (and failed) to integrate with the other platforms I use.
(You may want to skip these details below and go down to the summary – I won’t blame you if you do, but they are here for you if you’re interested.)
All in all, here’s what I discovered about Clickfunnels:
- Clickfunnels philosophy is that they are the end all and be all and will provide every solution that you will ever need for your business so there is no need to integrate with anything else (they have reluctantly provided a few integrations because people kept insisting, but it’s not to their liking).
- Their support is fine if you have basic questions (the kind I can figure out on my own), but if you have more in-depth questions, they won’t even understand your questions and will try to convince you that you don’t need it.
- Their support doesn’t like to escalate the problem to a developer or someone who can understand the problem and do something about it when it’s finally made clear to them that this is a real problem and not just my using the software outside their purview.
- Their support is incredibly slow. It’s chat based, so you’d think that you’d get answers back quickly especially if you reply to their response immediately, right? Wrong! I rarely got a response back in less than an hour (the shortest was 10 minutes, but that was only maybe once). And most of the time, I’d answer and then they’d be off shift (even though it was my morning) and I wouldn’t see a reply until the next day, at which time I’d answer, and again they’d be off-shift and wouldn’t answer again until the next day. So turn around time for a single response was nearly always at least 24 hours and frequently 2 or 3 days. Clearly their support is in a distant country because the time difference was huge.
- Development staff is limited (compared to something like WordPress). They do seem to have a good development staff, but they are still limited to (at most) a few hundred, and they can only do so much so fast.
And, here’s the reality of life…
- No one company can provide everything everyone would ever need (let alone want). It’s simply not possible or desirable. You can’t be an expert at everything and create the best possible thing in every single area that a website owner and marketer needs. And different people are going to need different things in the same area of software. That’s why there are so many products and each has its strengths and weaknesses and one works well for one customer and a different one works well for another customer.
So you need to let other companies work to their strengths and you integrate with them so that you can take advantage of what they do so well.
There’s a lot of things to integrate with, but WordPress, given it’s length of history and willingness to integrate, integrate with just about everything, and if there’s some new platform you want to use, you can bet someone will make an integration for it right quick.
Compare that to not wanting to integrate with anything and so dragging their feet on everything. Not to mention they just don’t have the resources to integrate with everything that anyone might want to integrate with (see #5). - In the time it took me just to get their support to understand what I was saying, I could have found and implemented a solution in WordPress. If you’re only going to use the software in a basic way, then their help is fine, but if you want to ask for help with anything slightly out of the ordinary, it’s not going to be much help.
- Sheesh, once you know the problem is a problem, escalate it! If you can’t understand the problem, escalate it to someone who can! I had to force escalation of real, true problems (for a long they insisted it wasn’t a problem even though I was clearly demonstrating that it was their problem and not my inputs) and that was a significant amount of work to even get it into the hands of someone who would! (And made some of their support mad in the process because I went around them)
- The turn around time on support is just horrible. Now, if I go to a WordPress group to get help on a problem, it’s probably going to be the same, but it’s rare that I’d have to do that – most of the time you’re going to find a solution much more quickly. For Clickfunnels there was no documentation of things I was seeking answers to, which is understandable given that they have only been in beta for a few months (compared to WordPress tens of years), but it means I couldn’t find my own answers, I was reliant on them and they weren’t nearly responsive enough.
- Their development team will never be as big as WordPress’ (in the tens of thousands), so they will never, ever be able to produce new features or fix bugs as quickly as WordPress. And you are never going to have the options and flexibility that you find in WordPress. WordPress has a significant, lengthy history so there’s TONS of stuff already built for it and more stuff being built every day by tons of different developers where as you have to wait for Clickfunnels to get around to your thing that you want because nobody can develop for Clickfunnels but Clickfunnels – and they still have basic stuff to do, so it’s going to be a long time before you get specialty stuff.
So, all in all… (and here’s the summary if you skipped all the details)
If you want to do things Clickfunnels way and only Clickfunnels way and never vary from it and are willing to wait for (or live without) new and cool stuff, then by all means use Clickfunnels.
But I want to do things the way I do them and have my software and tools fit my style, not the other way around.
I like flexibility!
Having their support was no faster than researching it on my own (if not slower), so their support was no help.
If I do want something that hasn’t been developed yet (unlikely for WordPress, but still possible – very common for Clickfunnels and will be for a long time), it’s incredibly easy to find someone to do it for WordPress, but you are totally dependent on the limited developers for Clickfunnels.
So, I can have it for WordPress and probably not for Clickfunnels.
Now take, for example, the revamped RosinaBignall.com…
It will be YEARS, if ever, before you will be able to produce something like that on Clickfunnels.
But there’s nothing on there that isn’t common on websites today.
So Clickfunnels is going to be a long time (if ever) before they can create sites with those nice little extras.
Cost wise, they are probably about the same, just that it’s little bits to lots of different places with WordPress (to get all the plugins to do all the features I want, which I can’t do with Clickfunnels anyway) instead of a big payment to one place.
Because of all that, I am repenting and going back to WordPress.
And I suggest you use WordPress too, even if it’s work to learn it.
Now after all that… what do you think of Clickfunnels vs WordPress?
Write me back and tell me what you think!
To your success!
Rosina
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