I recently picked up Rapid Niche Websites (discounted via PLR PRO… yay!). The deal was too good to pass up. Besides, I’ve been eyeing this for a while now since reading about Jeff’s plans on implementing the strategies outlined in The Master Plan (TMP).

What exactly is Rapid Niche Websites (RNW)? Well, it’s a set of tools that works in conjunction with WordPress. It has two distinct components: (1) RapidFormatter and (2) A set of custom-made plugins. RNW also comes with a set of WP themes that you can use straight out of the box or you choose to customize them first. I consider the themes as part of the RapidFormatter component, since this is where you customize them. By the way, the special deal brokered by PLR Pro includes an extra 5 themes.

RapidFormatter (RF) is a desktop application that allows you to customize your themes without having to know anything about PHP or cascading style sheets (CSS). It also functions as a deployment tool to ftp your theme and plugins directly into your site. Note that you don’t have to use RapidFormatter to upload your themes or plugins. You can simply grab them using whatever ftp-client you use to upload your files to your site. So, technically, you can just take the plugins and use them on any WP-site.

RF has a simple wizard interface that guide you through the changes you can make on your theme. RNW-based WP themes are different from a regular free WP theme out on the internet. This is because it uses special tokens specifically designed to work with RF. This also means that you cannot take a free theme and customize it using RF. Does this matter? Not really. There’s tons of stuff you can easily do in RapidFormatter that’ll customize the existing themes to your liking. Change the menus, the fonts, the colors, the sidebar, the header, the height, the width, the link hovers, etc. I’m a do-it-yourself kind of person, but I simply found RF to be such a time-saver.

The second component is the growing set of plugins that come with RNW. These plugins work hand in hand with RF to give you better control of your site. The Page Manager plugin allows you to have complete control of your homepage and other pages. The SEO Optimizer plugin allows you to fix your title tags, add footer keywords and static meta-tags. The Breadcrumbs Trail plugin gives your visitors another means of navigating your site. That’s just to name a few.

Just for clarification, RNW is not a site generator. Your site is still basically runs on WordPress. RNW simply adds functionality to it and gives you more control over your site (control that’s not inherently available through WP). You can still add other plugins that you normally use.

One final thing I liked about RNW is its ability to implement the silo-ing strategies in The Master Plan. I was able to tinker around with a couple of themes prior to RNW and sort of worked in a bit of the silo-ing, but it wasn’t nearly close to what RNW gives me. The ability to TMP my RNW themes over and over again through a point and click interface was simply awesome.

Overall, I like Rapid Niche Websites. I personally see it as purchasing custom-made (yet changeable) themes that can be TMP-ed and access to a growing set of plugins. In the end, RNW is not a must-have tool, especially for those of you who are WP-experts or if you’re simply satisfied with the free themes that are available and don’t need the added functionality for WP. However, I really found it to be a really great tool that can save me a lot of time. Yes, it all comes down to preference.

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