Drupal + BANS = A Beautiful Business

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I’ve tinkered with Drupal off and on throughout the year, but I’ve never actually done anything with it.  So when I decided that I could use an external CMS to make management of numerous BANS sites easier, I was happy that I could finally use Drupal for something other than building test sites to satisfy my geeky curiosity.

The greatest limitation of BANS is that it can only manage one niche site at a time.  But, given the nature of the system, you’re wasting a lot of opportunity if you only build one.  So is it better to build a dozen unrelated niche sites?  Or to build one integrated site serving a dozen different niches? 

I decided to go with the latter for a few reasons.  First is that it’s less expensive to buy one domain.  I have 46 MySQL databases left on my BlueHost account.  Should I spend $10 to build 46 BANS sites, or $460?  Seems like an obvious choice to me.  Additionally, I’m fairly certain that drawing traffic to one site with 46 categories will be more effective and cost-efficient than drawing traffic to 46 different sites.  This will allow me to concentrate my Pay Per Click marketing like Adwords on the higher traffic niches, allowing them to feed traffic to the lower traffic niches, which will rely more on free keyword and SEO marketing.  Whether it really works better or not, I can not yet say, but I do not see how it could possibly be worse.  If nothing else, I saved myself $450 dollars this month.

As this was the first time I’d ever looked into the code of a Drupal theme, I certainly hope they’re not all as convoluted as the one I chose today.  If I had to do it over again, I would certainly spend more time researching themes and, hopefully, pick an easier one to work with.  As I may have to do this again in the future, I will probably look at other themes and, if necessary, Xoops and Joomla as well, just to see if maybe Drupal wasn’t the best way to go.

Converting a theme from one CMS to another is slow and tedious work, at least for a journeyman hacker like me.  I know enough HTML, CSS, and PHP to stumble my way through the code, but not enough to get it right the first time.  Some poor server admin at BlueHost is probably trying to figure out why I uploaded HEADER.PHP and STYLE.CSS twoo hundred times today.  In the end, however, it was worth it.  It took me a few hours, but my Drupal and BANS themes are now identical, down to the pixel.  A visitor can enter the site in Drupal, read some text, navigate through menus, and view the categorized eBay listings without realizing that he has switched from Drupal to BANS. 

By seamlessly integrating the two systems under one common theme, I am now freed from the hassle of customizing the appearance of future BANS sites.  Although I still intend to use a custom header image for each niche, the rest of the theme is done.  This will allow me to create a new BANS niche site, excluding the time it takes to create the header, in about seven minutes.  That includes upload time for the files.

Between the BANS user forum, Digital Point, and bloggers like Jim Cockrum, I’ve now identified over two dozen individuals who claim to be earning at least a few hundred dollars a month per BANS site.  Many of these people claim to have earned their first hundred dollars within days of putting their site online.  I’m just getting started, and still want to do quite a bit of setup before I pay for any advertising, but this is looking very promising.  As with all of my efforts, I will update you here when I have something worth writing about.