Review: XSitePro
Looking to make money from your website? Kai Chandler reviews XSitePro site building tool.
| Product | XSitePro |
|---|---|
| Company | Intellimon Ltd |
| Web | www.xsitepro.com |
| Price | $197 |
| We like | Templates for quick site design, affiliate and SEO tools, powerful and flexible. |
| We don't like | Source editor needs some improvement |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Requirements |
We are told there are riches to be made from the Internet. If that's right, then any business entrepreneur will want to get his or her site online in the shortest possible time.
Although few would doubt the power of leading tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver for designing an attractive website, it needs a fair amount of savvy to get something off the ground.
- If you want an attractive site, are you going to be paying out for professionally created artwork and templates?
- If you want to make money from commission-paying Affiliate Links and Google Adwords, do you have the time to research how to build them into your site?
- If you want to get a high ranking position in Google, do you have the time and money to read all the books on Search Engine Optimisation?
Alternatively, why not use a website design tool that integrates all the above and more into one package?
XSitePro is an exciting new product from Intellimon Ltd that's pretty well bursting with features to help you build your site quickly and easily with a minimum of learning curve. If you take the time to follow the excellent tutorial, there's no reason why you can't build a site in under an hour. I built the site in the tutorial in about 45 minutes.
The basic process is as follows:
Step One - Add Project
The site build process starts with Add Project - this is where you set up the project details and add title and keywords. You can select a template or just create a blank website. You can tailor most aspects of the page layout and the design is immediately and transparently copied across all the pages on your site. The templates look very professional and you can choose from an Affiliate website templates or Sales Letter templates.
There are four tabbed menus:
Info - this is to enter page description, page title and keywords which are also used for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Design - a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) view for entering page content. If you can use Word, then you'll have no difficulty with this.
Source - a view of the HTML code and other scripts in your page
SEO - tools to optimise your page for search engines according to configurable rules
Step Two - Add Pages
It's easy to add pages to the project. Again, there are four tabbed menus where you enter the key data for each page. You can easily select the order in which they appear in the side panel or footer menus. You can preview your entire site at a click of a button to see how it looks before it gets published.
Step Three - Add Publishing Details
XSitePro has a built-in file transfer (FTP) tool for transferring your work up to your website. You just need to enter the key details such as username, address and password. There's no facility to transfer files back in the other direction.
Step Four - Publish
One button publishing lets you transfer your work to the server.
There are some very slick features that make XSitePro stand out:
Templates - The templates are excellent and a big plus for XSitePro over most other website design tools. If you want to see an example, then take a look at my website built with XSitePro - www.surfcontrols.com where I've used one of the affiliate templates supplied. Intellimon are continually designing templates and they will be added to future releases. There's also a range of buttons, ticks, boxes and other "furniture" to give your site the "designer" touch.
Search Engine Optimisation - XsitePro analyses the title and content of each page against a set of build in but customisable rules, lists the detailed results and recommends specific action to fine-tune the content.
For example, it will remind you that keywords should appear in Alt tags or that the number of words in the page description should be more than 20.
When no more messages appear, you can be sure the page is well optimised. XsitePro generates metatags automatically.
Affiliate and Google adsense tools - if you are looking to build income from your site then you'll appreciate XSitePro's tools to let you store your links and account information in a central database, ready to be deployed with a couple of clicks. New in version 1.50 is a feature to allow you to build a Google Site Map very easily.
Popup creator and more - Popular with website creators but less so with users, XSitePro includes a popup tool that lets you catch traffic in a variety of ways.
There are so many other features it's easy to lose count. Of course you don't need them all but it's interesting to try different approaches. Examples include tools to let you create a breadcrumb trail, a links page, two types of site map and a contact page. There are also options to export the site to Frontpage or Dreamweaver. There also several essential reports such as the To-Do report which lists remaining tasks before your site is complete.
Despite the range of features and tools it's really quick and easy to build professional looking sites and the SEO tools help ensure you'll attract traffic as quick as possible.
I'm almost reluctant to mention any weaknesses in XSitePro as Intellimon seem to fix them almost as fast as I report them but one weakness in the current version is that the source code view is very difficult to use. The code is too small and not formatted. An improvement is promised shortly but to make a change at this level, I'll continue to copy and paste code into TextPad or Dreamweaver.
Customer support is very impressive and the newly launched Discussion Board lets the rapidly growing user community share tips and suggestions. They certainly helped provide some helpful feedback on www.surfcontrols.com.
To sum up, if you want to make money from websites quickly and easily then XSitePro may be the only purchase you'll need. From start to finish in under an hour and if you haven't made your fortune in a year, then you can always get your money back. Isn't life great?
Click here for full product details and 365 day money-back offer.
