Product Review: XSitePro Website Design Software

XSitePro

Review by James Albert

If there's one thing I hate, it's wasting time. So when I first heard about the XSitePro Web Design software, the first thing I thought was, "that's exactly what I need!"

I mean, as a web marketer of any type or sort, the last thing you want to do is get bogged down with the nuts and bolts of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and website templates that don't work right.

You need to focus your creative energy on MARKETING, not on learning the finer points of web design. Unless, of course, you happen to BE a web designer...

It Sounded Good, But I Was Skeptical

I spent a lot of time going through the XSitePro website and I could barely contain my enthusiasm.

But...I've been so thoroughly disappointed countless times before by products, how-to guides, and services that offered the world only to deliver junk, that I remained skeptical.

Like the saying goes...the proof is in the pudding.

Jaded James Plunks Down The Cash...

I realized that the only way to know for sure whether this thing actually works as advertised is to pony up and buy it.

So that's what I did.

The purchase and download went through quite easily and I didn't experience any problems. I was leery about possible problems due to my computer's memory which was below the minimum level recommended by XSitePro. But as far as the mechanics were concerned, it worked without a hitch.

James Puts XSitePro To The Test

There is definitely a learning curve with XSitePro, but the documentation and tutorials that come with it are extremely thorough.

So even though I was chomping at the bit to use XSitePro with my primary multi-paged website, I resisted the urge until I went through the ridiculously boring tutorial they run you through building a fictitious floor covering website.

It was boring, but an extremely fast method of learning how to use XSitePro.

Finally, I chose a suitable template from a huge pool of templates that come with the program and started working on my website. I was surprised--almost shocked--by how well everything worked. No doubt about it, this was truly a great program which would save me tons of time.

XSitePro vs. Microsoft FrontPage

Prior to XSitePro, I had been using Microsoft FrontPage with my websites. And though I was able to create and maintain mult-paged websites using it, it took me a tremendous amount of time to do it.

With FrontPage, there is nothing to bind together separate pages of your website--you work on each page separately and then bind them together manually.

With XSitePro, the website and all its contents including contact page, privacy policy, site map, etc., are all bound together within the website and changes you make to one page are automatically reflected on any other pages or components of the site that reference it, including menus.

Which means you spend far less time fiddling with web page mechanics and can devote most of your time with the site content. This is huge.

Is XSitePro Perfect?

Like any other good program or product, NOTHING'S perfect. And that includes XSitePro. There are occasional glitches. There are some things that could be improved and a few features I'd like to see. For example:

• The Affiliate Link Wizard could be vastly improved if it was combined with the Redirect Page function that is provided in a different section of XSitePro.

• The Page Formatting tools could be improved a bit to allow more flexibility. For example, to put some space between bulleted lists such as this one, you have to fiddle with your backspace and return keys or insert a <br> within the HTML source code. Admittedly, easy enough to do as the source code is always one click away, and it's not that hard to hit a few keys, but hey, it's something.

• There could be more flexibility when making changes to the graphics of the various template designs. It can be done, but does require some time and skill.

Final Analysis

Of all the marketing related purchases I have made, I can't think of any product or service that even remotely delivered the amount of value I received with XSitePro.

I recently found out exactly how valuable XSitePro is to me when my previous web host went belly up and I had to move my sites to a different hosting company.

I found that I was unable to upload the XSitePro files to the new hosting account and the customer service rep was telling me to just convert the files to FrontPage and upload them using a regular FTP program. I told her flat out THAT wasn't an option and that if their hosting didn't work with XSitePro I would finding different hosting. As it turned out, the "error" was on their end and once the correction was made, my website files uploaded flawlessly.

My recommendation: If you want a high powered web design program that delivers as advertised, get X Site Pro Web Design Software.