Here are the most important tools you need to have a website. And how they all work together. If you’re looking for tutorials for your Sapling Website, visit Tour of the Maple Website Platform (V3)
WordPress is the most flexible and scalable content management system (CMS) used by websites all over the internet. I like to think about WordPress as the operating system for your website – and just like an operating system, there are essential functions and custom software that you can install to extend your abilities to get exactly what you need in your website.
Thousands of people have contributed to refining and improving the WordPress software, making it both user-friendly and highly customizable. Maple Creative offers a bespoke WordPress experience, supported by a friendly team of builders.
Beaver Builder is a company that solely focuses on making the best, most user friendly page builder around. It gives you full editorial control on important pages like your homepage, about page, and program pages. I love this plugin so much I license it for all my clients and call it “Maple Builder”. We’ve created the entire Sapling Website with this page builder so you can easily edit your pages and layouts.
Flywheel is the premium hosting option for WordPress websites. It’s for people who want to keep things simple and provide the best possible experience for themselves and their website visitors.
It’s "expensive" if you compare them to business as usual – but it's a bargain in all the time and hassle you save dealing with technical issues and fighting off upsells. You can set up a self-hosted WordPress site in 30 seconds for free, give it a spin, and even migrate your existing site to Flywheel free. http://share.getf.ly/j83z1b
Domain management, DNS, IP addresses... all this stuff can give any content creator a headache, even if you know how it all works.
Setting up and making changes to your web domain should be simple, and you shouldn't have to wade through a swamp of salesmen to get your work done. That’s why I use premium domain management from Hover. Get $2 off your domain using our link: https://hover.com/amv1vea9
Hover is the perfect example of how working with a specialist will always get you better results. If you ever have questions or issues with your domain, their support team will often just fix it for you, no hassle, which goes a long way with your most important asset, your domain.
I've been a fan of ConvertKit despite the unfitting name. This is one of the most sincere marketing companies run by really amazing and generous people. Just ask me and I can tell you more. For course creators, bloggers, and organizations, ConvertKit is the best way to manage email automation and subscribers.
→ Create a free ConvertKit account here
One of the best things about WordPress is that you can install plugins, which opens up your website to an entire universe of diverse independent software developers who create add-ons for WordPress.
Here are a couple of plugins that you can use to improve your website over the long run.
For the longest time, website analytics software was seriously bad. It was hard to understand, time-consuming to use, and worse, it exploited visitor data for big tech to profit.
Fathom is a Google Analytics alternative that doesn’t compromise visitor privacy for data. Maple provides license to Fathom Analytics and encourages our clients to respect their readers privacy and comply with privacy laws that are standing up to US data corporations.
Rankmath is an SEO plugin that we license and install on our client websites – and configure and maintain for clients on a Standard or Professional Care Plan.
It optimizes your website and content to be indexed properly by search engines and allows you to specify how you want to show up in search results. You can add keywords to articles, and even analyze your content and have tips for improving it.
There are some other ways you can extend the function of your website depending on your needs. For example, if you’re a service provider, having a booking calendar on your website makes it easy for people to schedule appointments with you. If you plan events, having a calendar of upcoming events and links to RSVP will be important. Here are some other tools that would help.
Free Online Form Builder | Tally
TidyCal | The simple booking solution.