Well, I messed around with my membership site some more yesterday and had a frustrating time. More about that in a minute. If you’re just reading this you can find the rest over in part one.

Anyhow, like I said, I decided to use Wordpress to deliver my content. Because I feel a membership site should be simple and without a lot of distractions I chose a very simple Wordpress theme “Alibi“.

Alibi is a two column theme with tabbed navigation. My idea is to have the main categories on the top and relevant resource links on the right side. Each post will contain videos on the following topics (form my outline):

• Web design
• Keyword research
• online marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Link Building
• Email Marketing
• Online communities
• social media
• Affiliate marketing

I now have hundreds of videos which I have either created or licensed which brings up the point of my frustrations mentioned above.

I spent much of the day messing around with various .flv (Flash Video) player plugins for Wordpress. I tried various .flv player plugins and to be honest, I don’t like any of them yet. I tried free players like FLV Player, AFC player, another one I can’t remember, and a commercial one I purchased called FLVPlugin.

Already, adding all the videos to the site has been a big pain. Whenever I try to upload a video over 8M I get an error message saying that the php.ini file on my server limits uploads to 8M. I created a new php.ini file and dropped it in wp-admin but it didn’t seem to have any effect.

Anyhow, what I am coming to believe is that uploading my .flvs through the wordpress user interface(UI) may not be the best idea. What i’ll have to do is place all the videos on the server and then painstakingly enter the path for each video in my the Wordpress UI.

So, with regards to the video I am back to sorting and renaming the videos as simply and intuitively as possible preparing to dump them on my server which brings me to the next point - hosting.

As I said in part one, I decided to go with Godaddy Grid Hosting which according to Godaddy…

“If conventional hosting plans can’t keep up with your demands, go with the provider that can match load requirements as your site grows. Grid Hosting from Go Daddy puts the power of multiple servers to work for you. With elastic scalability, 99.9% uptime and no need for site migration during growth spurts, Grid Hosting is always at the ready!”

We’ll see. I am looking forward to trying out the grid hosting which comes with 100GB storage and 1000GB bandwidth each month. I’m not a huge fan of Godaddy hosting, but they do have good support and the prices are ridiculously low.

I use Vexxhost VPS for my other hosting which is a good deal if you know a little bit about server admin through WHM. Vexxhost support is terribly slow.

I haven’t installed the membership plugins yet but will be getting to that next. For my last membership site I used AMember and it works okay. Amember was confusing for me to work with though and I found documentation and support both wanting.

This time I am considering the follwing plugins:

• Wishlist Member
• MemberWing
• YourMembers

I have read good things about all these plugins from numerous sources. I will continue this discussion in part three when I update you on which membership plugin I decide to go with. Again, feel free to comment.

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