Wow, I’ve just seen the Envato site offer of a full website installation and hosting for $4 a month. I can’t beat that but I am still promoting it. Why? Read on…

Whilst it may appear to be a business killer for me, it’s actually not. It’s the best thing ever for my business.

Most people want a website (and are on a budget) and often request something simple and ‘quick’. They also want it to look great. Cheap, Quick, and Great is a unicorn – it doesn’t exist! You can have any two, but not all three!

So, Envato’s deal looks perfect for those seeking the Unicorn website – fast, great, and cheap.

Here’s the problem. You can only get fast, cheap and great if you compromise. Your idea of a website needs to fit, exactly, what they offer. Which means copy (often the exact amount of copy), images (position, size, composition, and style), buttons (position, placement and amount of), navigation items (text length of labels, number of items, and dropdown items if used), and obviously, page templates generally… oh, and forms! Don’t forget those.

How many of you are willing to compromise your business/plan to fit into their templates? Not many I bet. Or you think you can, until you try it! Read on…

Now, from what I understand, the site you get is pure WordPress – nothing is held back. It’s everything as good as I could produce. Hooray! Which means, you can edit any/every item on the page to your own tastes. Great, and you will need to edit things because your business offering will never match their templates perfectly, remember?

So, with all that control, and after fiddling with all the menu items, images and copy, you will refresh the site, and see that things don’t look good. At least not as good as the initial template was. And/or, you will quickly discover that you’ll need something the template doesn’t allow for, or perhaps you’ll dig away at the features and functions and break something completely. No worries. I bet Envato has that covered (I hope!) by allowing you to ‘reset’ the site and start all over again!

Oh, dear. So much for quick!

A $4 (hosted) WordPress website, connected to your domain, offers the perfect solution for someone who knows what they’re doing. Unfortunately, unless you’re building WordPress websites every day, you’re not going to know what you’re doing, and break things.

Then who are you gunna call? Not Ghostbusters… and probably me.

I haven’t tried out this service yet, I’ve just scanned the pages, and read the guides. I’m already guessing that a $4 website is more designed for people like me–working with WordPress every day–than non-WordPress entrepreneurs. If anyone decides to give it a go and gets into hot water, I won’t remind you of this post and belittle you. Promise. I’ll just jump in and fix things, though sadly, I can’t charge $4 a month!

Good luck and let me know how you get on.

Mark