XSitePro 2 Review - is XSitePro Still Easy Website design?

In this review I will offer my opinion of XSitePro 2 upgrade and especially the following aspects:
1. Is the software easy to use?
2. Can you design a professional looking website with it?
3. What extras are there?
4. Are the extras worth more money?

Having used XSitePro quite happily for a year I was in two minds whether or not to pay for the May 2008 upgrade to version 2. The aspects that I liked about this website design software were the ease of use, speed and the quick analysis of my website pages for optimisation.

The downside has always been not very good templates and a recognisable same as look for many XSitePro sites. Despite that I found the software quicker and easier to use than Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

Temptation got the better of me and soon after the upgrade was mine I was redesigning one of my older websites. As some far more professional looking templates had been added I used one of those for practice after completing the website building tutorial.

Next I imported another of my sites but added my own banner and used one of the 30 navigational menu designs provided and changed it to my own colour selection to blend with the banner. I then started to build a music site using one of their templates and am now building a travel site from scratch with my own design.

I’m really pleased with all of the websites; to my eyes they look good and even my own designs look more professional than they would if I used Dreamweaver or FrontPage. The XSitePro sameness is a thing of the past. For someone like myself who has the aspirations but not the ability of a professional website designer and wants to design their own sites XSitePro 2 is a great tool.

There are several new features that I am enjoying experimenting with. 30 different navigational menus with colour selection I have already mentioned, but you can now easily place your choice of menu at the left, right or bottom of the page or as an info bar at the top. Your navigational menus can be added to more than one place and easily altered if you want to change the design.

New pages can be added easily and you are prompted to start optimising them for the search engines straight away. Article pages are new, there are 11 different styles that you can further customise or you can use a blank page. You can choose when the content is published, for instance you can set up an advertising campaign to automatically come online on a pre set date.

A new feature that I'm finding useful for the travel site that I'm building is that you can have a different right hand margin for every page. As each page has a different destination I am using that feature for my hotel affiliate links for those particular destinations.

Adding Google ads is still easily done but now you can add Amazon ads in the same way and customise the ads to integrate with your website. You can store your publisher ids and channels, so once they are stored a couple of clicks and your site is monetised. You can also store your affiliate links and you don't have to visit Paypal to set up payment schemes. These features save a lot of time from having to search while adding your advertising.

I'm quite taken by the Mobile Site Wizard. In a couple of minutes I created versions of my sites that are automatically optimised for viewing on mobile phones or Internet able PDAs. I wouldn't have thought of doing that but now my websites are available for viewing to a wider audience.

There are tons of graphics that you can use and it's easy to upload your own graphics. A form wizard with different form designs that you can use to capture email addresses is new, also a banner rotator - and one of my favourites an image gallery creator. There is now a selection of social bookmarking icons that are easy to add to the pages and an RSS feed creator that can be used on the pages that you want syndicating.

You can now choose to add 3 different site maps and use siloing to help with the search engines. Redirects, customisable search boxes and pop ups are quick to add and I nearly forgot – you can have streaming audio and videos on your web pages.

There are so many new and improved features with XSitePro version 2 that it's impossible to mention them all here. So I'm going to finish with my absolute favourite the Links Page Wizard. In the old version your links page was just a list of sites and descriptions, now you can do a lot more. You can customise the links pages to blend in with your site design, add your own text or ads to the pages and best of all split into categories and include a longer description and screenshot.

The screenshots get my vote - apart from it being more appealing to other webmasters to exchange links with you; every time those web pages are updated you get fresh content to help keep the search engines happy. Although this is my favourite feature it also holds the only downside that I've found so far. I wanted to add the XSitePro company website to my links pages but the software has problems with the screenshot for their site and it won't view duh!

Is XSitePro Version 2 Worth The Asking Price?

For somebody who only wants one or two websites then I would say no. There are plenty of website designers including XSitePro users advertising on the Internet. Or there are lots of ready made free or paid for templates or free site building resources available on the Internet.

I believe that it is absolutely worth the full asking price if like myself you want to build multiple big websites with constant content updates, sales pages or smaller sites. Or if like me you wake up one morning and think that your site looks as messy as your hair and you want to change the design throughout as quick as it takes to get your hair restyled. It's also easy to change your site design back when you realise that you should have woken up properly first with a cup of coffee!

I am having a lot of fun with XSitePro 2 and am finding using it refreshing after spending several months struggling to learn how to use the rather more expensive Memberspeed membership site software. It may not be fair to compare them as they have different functions, but although excellent in it's own way I find Memberspeed hard to use and very time consuming and frustrating in comparison. Maybe that will be the next review.

What Upgrades Would I Like to See in the Future?

Although I got far more than I expected with the upgrade and am having a lot of fun using the software it does no harm to have a wish list. I think what would be the most useful is more interactivity with site visitors, perhaps the option of visitors being able to add comments. A shopping cart and a way to add members built into the software – you never know what they might surprise us with next!

Patricia has been writing articles and reviews and building websites for
several years. Check out more of her work at the Creative Writer and Make Money From Writing websites. Or visit the Mega Music Site
Her latest website is at www.uksmartguide.com which has entirely been built with XSitePro

The Article Marketing Handbook – Will it Help Article Marketers?

This review is my personal opinion of 'The Article Marketing Handbook' I'll tell you:

1) What it's about
2} Did I learn anything?
3} Is it worth the asking price?

I’ve read a lot of articles, ebooks and forum posts about article marketing and have found that the information and advice offered can be conflicting and confusing to new article marketers. As an article marketer I have studied the results from my own campaigns and come to my own conclusions. As an article directory owner I can see from studying the site stats month after month which articles are working for the authors. I can also see from Google searches which articles have been found on my site and republished on blogs or websites.

With the double insight of article marketer and directory owner it can be frustrating to see articles being submitted that you know will not be effective for the authors. On the other hand you learn to recognise articles that are going to do well for the authors and your directory.

With this in mind I was curious to read ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ written by Allen Graves – an experienced article directory owner and article marketer. I’ve come across Allen in forums and have to admit that we don’t always agree, but it is plain to see that Allen cares about article marketing. Because Allen has been involved with article marketing longer than I have I hoped that I would learn something from his handbook. I also felt that as he had the same opportunity of double insight as I have albeit for longer that ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ should be as good as if not better than anything that I have previously read. My expectations were high so lets see if the handbook lived up to them.

The Content

At first I was impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the ebook and wasn’t happy with the long introduction and theorising in the first couple of chapters, but then I saw that Allen was expressing why it is important to get your article marketing campaign right. It isn’t just information - it’s plain common sense that every article marketer should consider before embarking on a marketing campaign and worth reading.

Allen then guides you through selecting your niche, ways of discovering what information your readers are searching for and spending money on and how to find the best keywords. All useful information and if used correctly should help you to write more effective articles.

You learn why you should use pen names and how to select them. How to write titles that grab a reader’s attention while appealing to search engines. How to best summarise your articles and how to format the article body to capture the reader’s attention and keep them reading. Some tips are also included on how to write your author resource box to gain higher click throughs to your website.

Did I learn Anything?

Yes I did. I was particularly interested in a chapter explaining how to find the best places to submit your articles to and why. Also how to get more click throughs by promoting your articles after your submissions have been accepted. Both ideas are so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of them.

There are several more article marketing tricks that I have noticed used by authors who submit to my directories and hadn’t really thought about. To find out if they work I checked my site stats and sure enough those articles were getting more than the average hits. That could be a coincidence or those tricks could be working for the authors and my directories.

What I Think

There is a whole lot more information but now I’m going to tell you what I think about ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’. The ebook is well written and in a no BS style that I personally like. For anybody familiar with article or Internet marketing it’s easy to understand, but those new to the field may struggle without more basic information about for instance the importance of keywords and phrases. But, that and other basic information can be readily found with an Internet search.

Is It Worth The $47 Asking Price?

For most ebooks I would say absolutely not. That is because there are thousands of ebooks available on the Internet free or at incredibly low prices and that muddies the water on perceived value. The Article Marketing Handbook is different in that it provides a lot of information and advice that I haven’t seen before in any article, forum or ebook. Information and advice that I know from experience is correct even if I hadn’t thought about some of it before reading the handbook.

The Article Marketing Handbook is by far the best guide I have read on the subject of article marketing, so I wasn’t disappointed. As Allen will be providing updates as the market changes I would consider the one off $47 payment to be a good investment for ongoing success in the article marketing field.


The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including The Creative Writer and Make Money From Writing

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Update At Last

I've been lax again about updating this blog. Been very busy with my Joint music venture with Gary Vine. Our partnership business name is JV Creations and I have built a website at www.jvcreations.co.uk for our partnership. Gary is in the process of building a music download site at www.megamusicvideos.co.uk, I am building up the original mega music site and we are building a music website design and hosting service sites. Mega Music Talent went belly up when I tried to upgrade the memberspeed software. That software could be really good but it brings so many problems that we have decided not to use it on our sites and build something else on that site instead.

XSitePro version 2 came out recently and I've been having a splendid time rebuilding some of my sites and building new ones. There are so many added features to the upgrade that I'm finding the software awesome. I've written a review about XSitePro 2 and will post that next.

My latest website is at www.uksmartguide.com I've got a lot to do but I intend to include articles, pictures and information about every area of the UK in time.

BB Articles is still going strong, over 50,00 articles now but it won't grow much for a while because I'm gradually deleting articles that have dead links. Rather than delete them all I am considering adding a link for a charity instead if the authors don't get back to me with new links.

Writing Reviews For Article Marketing

There are several review sites on the Internet and for two years I regularly submitted reviews to two of them. Reviews are a writer’s opinion of a product or service and writing and submitting them are in some ways similar but also different to writing for article marketing. In this article I’m going to make comparisons and show how I think that reviews can be used in article marketing.

Detail and Information

For me writing reviews was good grounding for article marketing. I had previously written articles for home business magazines but when I started to write reviews I soon found that I needed to add more detail and information to do well in the review site ratings and earnings, sometimes it could get a bit silly when over critical members would want to know every little detail about packaging when the site owners did not.

The more detail and information we add to an article the better. Some article marketers split their information into several articles instead of writing one information packed article. That may work better for getting quick back links but if I tried to do that I would feel as if I was selling myself and readers short. There is always the option of using part 1, 2, 3 etc in the article titles but if a site visitor looking for information found part 3 first would they bother to look for parts 1 and 2 when they can just click back to the search engine and find a full article on the subject that they are interested in?

As we are always hopeful that a publisher may use our articles as website or ezine content I suspect that if an article comes in several parts it would have to be really good to stand a chance of being chosen.

Warts And All

There is a difference between reviews written for sites like Ciao and Dooyoo and reviews written for article marketing. On the review sites you review a product warts and all. The reviews need to be honest because it is useful feedback for manufacturers and because the review sites are communities your credibility is at stake amongst other members. The rewards are not very high even for top writers, but I guess that would depend on which area of the world that you live in.

Most of the reviews that I’ve seen in article or Internet marketing are full of praise and no warts. You know that the authors are trying to sell a product or get readers to join the latest millionaire making affiliate programme. You also know that many of the reviews will be dishonest because the authors are trying to gain product or affiliate sales.

In article marketing the rewards are backlinks to your sites and hopefully syndication of your articles to get more backlinks. The money that can be earned through article marketing is greater and especially if an article goes viral, but as with review sites you don’t earn anything if you don’t get it right.

Getting Content Right

Getting the content right for reviews and article marketing is much the same. Quality, information, legibility, correct grammar and punctuation, advice, detail, layout and for me simplifying technical explanations to a level that most can understand. That last one was my idea! If a reviewer is writing about a particular model of mp3 player and that review is found in a search for information about mp3 players by somebody interested in buying one; and the reader can’t understand the technical jargon then they are going to look elsewhere for advice.

The same applies to article marketing. If your article about mp3 players is linking back to your site or blog that incidentally has adverts for mp3 players you want the reader to go all the way down to the bottom and click on your link, not click away because you have lost their understanding part way through. As a publisher looking for website content I would be more likely to go for an article that is easy to understand rather than one giving the same information but full of technical jargon. That is unless you are aiming your article towards techie sites and that’s a whole different ball game.

When you write product reviews for the review sites you don’t need to think about key words and phrases as in article marketing, though if the review sites pay per visitor click it’s not a bad idea to use them. In article marketing we learn to use key words and phrases in our article titles and article body, but when we use too many it can make an article harder to understand and read. If a publisher is looking for good content that will capture visitor’s interest and keep them on their site longer they will be happy with key words and phrases used in context with an article but not if they are too many and placed where they don’t fit.

Knowing Your Subject

When you review a product you are expected be familiar with and have used the product enough to be able to give a fair assessment of it. For instance a review about a washing machine that you have been using regularly for several months is far more credible and useful as feedback and for prospective buyer information than a review about a washing machine that you have only just bought and used twice.

The same should apply to article marketing and in many cases it happens, but there are also lots of contrived articles. The best writers can carry it off and make it seem as if they use a product or service but many writers can’t fake it. It is pretty obvious that they have gleaned their information from sales spiel and the lack of user experience in an article lowers it’s worth for readers looking for information and publishers looking for content.

My biggest bugbear is travel articles. I love reading about different places from a visitor’s point of view. Contrived travel articles are generally boring and next to useless for readers who want to know what a place is really like and are looking for tips before they book their holiday. If I couldn’t produce more information than can be found on a travel brochure I wouldn’t write about a place.

Do Reviews Work In Article Marketing

I think that there is a place for reviews in article marketing and if they are well written and show user experience they are good for publishers to use as content. Reviews can be written about almost any product or service giving a wide range of subjects to write about – as long as that product or service isn’t your own!

The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including Mega Music Site, Articles Abroad which offers travel information and The Creative Writer