Rapid Niche Websites is a “system” of building Wordpress niche blogs. It includes:

1) Nine WP themes

2) A comprehensive, 229 page manual on how to set up your niche WP business and use the tools.

3) Several useful plugins

4) The “RapidFormatter”, which is a powerful Wordpress theme builder.

5) A user forum and some extra spiffs.

Rapid Niche Websites can be used effectively no matter where your WP experience level is. If you are still new to online publishing, you will find the manual valuable in that it takes you step by step from concept, through WP blog building, adding the RNW features, monetizing, and promoting your site. If you are more experienced, the value to you will be in the great plugins and the formatting tool.

Lets look at this feature by feature:

1) Nine WP themes. Most of these can be seen on the Rapid Niche Websites sales page. There are nine very attractive themes built for you, with various configurations and color schemes. I don’t like building my own themes, and I appreciate the value of these. These are built with SEO in mind, something that oddly seems rare for Wordpress themes. It is easy to modify these themes either manually or with the RapidFormatter tool.

2) The manual - When I opened this and saw it was 229 pages, I was very discouraged. I thought it would be page after page of fluff, like so many of these are, and I would have to painfully extract the value. However, this isn’t the case. It’s well-organized and heavily illustrated, and I found it easy to skip through the parts I didn’t want to read. This manual takes you step by step through the entire process of building a site. It also includes details on using all of the RNW tools. The meat of it, for the more experienced users, is the WP configuration and use of the plug-ins.

3) The plug-ins. If you’ve ever used Wordpress to build niche sites, you quickly realize it has some weaknesses. WP is an absolutely outstanding builder, and my hats go off to the geniuses that built it. However, it was never built with SEO in mind, so niche builders need to rectify this. The easiest way is by using plug-ins to add the necessary functionality. Here are descriptions of some of the plugins:

     - RNW - SEO Optimizer - Probably the biggest frustration that builders have with WP is that it doesn’t add some of the standard meta tags, like a page title, description, and keywords. So your site can be optimized, but not individual pages. This plug-in handles that, and allows you to put in these tags by page, not at the site level.

     - RNW - Pagemanager - This one allows you to designate a page as your site’s home page. I love this, because I now have a regular-looking site, that doesn’t look like a blog. I can put anything I want on this new home page. It also takes care of a weakness in the way WP displays a home page, and allows SE’s to see the home page as yourdomain.com, instead of using the WP permalink structure to feed the right page as the front page.

     - Exec-PHP - This is a plugin that allows the execution of php within a post. WP normally screw this up, and doesn’t execute it properly. This may or not be useful to you, depending on what you do with your sites.

     - Redirectify - This is just a handy little redirect tool that allows you to add a page and re-direct it somewhere else. So it will show up on your menu as a page, but takes the reader wherever you want.

     - Google sitemap - RNW includes this popular plugin written by Arne Brachhold. It creates a Google-formatted xml sitemap and pings Google with it. Yahoo and MSN have recently joined the Google sitemaps program, too, so there is now added benefit. If you don’t buy RNW, but want this free plugin, go here:  http://www.arnebrachhold.de/

     - NicheFeed - This plugin allows you to include rss feeds in your posts. This is particularly valuable if you are using publicly available articles as your posts. It will help make your pages unique. It will make portions of you pages change, a feature the SE’s seem to like. I like 10-25% of my pages content to change, no more. The tool is configurable so you can use any feeds and keywords you want, and can designate the number of feeds on the page.

 

4) The RapidFormatter tool.  This is a WYSIWYG editor that build WP themes. It is a very powerful builder that allows you to start by using one of the sample themes supplied. The menu driven system allows you to choose overall layout, color schemes, and content of the various page areas. (Like header, footer, sidebars, content, menu’s, etc.) It also allows you to get to the css, and gives you an easy tool to modify the styles and colors. For those of you that are not coders, you will find that you can use this tool to build your sites any way you want. It is as easy to build custom blogs using this as it is to build a site using tools like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. For some of you, the entire value of RNW will be in this tool. But if you are pretty good with php and css code, you will probably find it easier to modify your themes using regular html editors. 

The process starts with defining your main page layout. How many columns, whether fixed or variable width, menus on left or right. Then you define your header area. You can use up to three columns for the header, and include images or just use solid colors. You can also build a sub-header in a similar manner. Some people use this area as an additional menu bar. You then similarly modify the other sections of the page. All the modifications you make are immediately visible in the editor.

After your theme is built using the RapidFormatter, the tool ftp’s it to your site. I found it a little cumbersome that your themes are tied to sites, and not stored generically. I guess that’s the way most of the world works, by building one site at a time! I tend to use a few themes over and over. So to accomplish my goals, I would copy a theme from one site to a new one. 

5) User forum and extra spiffs - There are a few e-books included with your purchase. Also, the RSS Announcer program is included. You can use this to broadcast your site to various rss directory sites. (Wordpress is also configured to broadcast your posts to as many ping sites as you choose.) The user forum is moderated often. It is not a very busy forum at this point, but it seems like people asking questions are able to get them answered fairly quickly.

 

Ease of Use:

This is a complex program, with a lot included. Whenever I get a program like this, I try to follow the instructions step by step, the first time, to get a feel for how most users will see this. So rather than just jumping in, I followed everything in the manual, in the order it was presented. Doing this took me about three hours start to finish. Considering the complexity, I was pretty impressed with that. There was not one thing I couldn’t figure out by looking in the manual or at the software. The user interface is pretty friendly.

In the future, I will probably not do much theme customization, as I tend to use what works for me. I will put the themes and plugins into my standard WP install folder, so I can quickly upload them to new sites I’m building. I think this is how most advanced users will use this tool.

The usability of Rapid Niche Websites tool was flawless as far as I could tell. I didn’t find any bugs or quirks that couldn’t be explained. The manual was accurate and up to date with the program. This is a package that is presented very professionally, which is not always the case for internet tools.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to e-mail me.

Happy blogging!

David