[Madeline Gabriel]

Hello – I’m new here and I really appreciate the thoughtful advice I’ve read so far. I am a professional dog trainer specializing in helping families succeed when they have a dog and are adding a baby or working through the trying toddler years. I’ve been doing this since 2002, except for a few years off (including a year long family RV trip – love the RV life!) and now I am taking a book project and reworking it into an online course format.

I have both time and interest in DIY and a small/reasonable budget to spend on help.where needed. I am reluctant to spend my budget on stuff I can do myself at least at a B/B+ level. Are these reasonable plans?:

* Thrive Theme Builder to redo my old wordpress site to be more modern/sales-focused and bring over existing blog content. Seems I can do that myself with some help. True? Thrive Architect is not what I need, right, for a basic website/blog?

* I did trials with LearnDash and Dropfunnels and didn’t like for various reasons (LearnDash too complicated, Dropfunnels didn’t have features I wanted). For now, my plan is to use the Thinkific platform for my initial course(s), primarily because it felt very easy for getting started and because it has in-lesson discussion options that allow students to share video and at least starting level features for an affiliate program, customer database/email integrations and pretty important to me – the ability to add other “instructors”/TA’s to manage class interactions. Once I have a better handle on what I’m actually going to use, I think I would be able to make a better educated decision on migrating to hosting an LMS on my own site. (The Thinkific course would be linked from my website.) Am I missing an important piece about why I might regret this vs learning a WordPress LMS right now?

I’m anxious to get out of the research/planning stage and at least get my new website up and start marketing among my colleagues and actually building the course. (Initial focus is to help expectant/new parents prep their dog for success with a new baby with a “30 Day Prep for Baby Challenge Course” (not necessarily that name) and a free mini-course on one piece of my framework, “The Get Out of Bite Free Card.”)

Thank you for any insights anyone wants to share! I appreciate being here!

[David Risley]

Hello, fello RVer. 🙂

So, Thrive Theme Builder and Architect are 2 different products, although they’re pretty complementary. Architect is for editing content and landing pages. If you only have Theme Builder, then you’ll get a “light” version of Architect but it will only be able to deal with the theme, you won’t be able to edit content with the same editor.

As for the LMS, I am partial to self-hosting it on WordPress. But certainly, if you feel more at home inside Thinkific, then that’s fine. The big thing is that you can manage your product as you want. And that’s more important than the platform. Sure, you’ll lose some flexibility, but might not be a big deal.

Little suprised you found LearnDash to be complex, tho.

[Madeline Gabriel]

Thanks for the reply! I signed up for the Thrive membership last night so I’ll play around with the different options. I did a Black Friday trial with LearnDash and the eLumine theme and it wasn’t easy to see before the end of the trial period that that combo was going to work for me. It’s on my back burner to revisit once I get my initial course up and running and get my feet wet with what I’m actually going to use.