XSitePro Review
by David
www.webtooltime.com

XSitePro is my site builder of choice when I am looking to build a nice looking, straightforward site filled with articles or other standard page content. It is a very quick and powerful tool for this type of site, and gives you the ability to build professional looking sites without having any technical or artistic knowledge. However, it does have its shortcomings in flexibility, which I will explain later. XSitePro takes site building a step farther by including a great set of search engine optimization tools. It also includes the ability to import other pages to enable the quick building of a site when articles are already written and stored somewhere else.

When XSitePro came out in early 2005, I was using html editors and occasionally Frontpage to build web sites. I really wanted something that would save some of the actual site-building time. So when I saw XSP, I bought it right away. One of the great strengths of this tool is that there is a short learning curve to get started. I had a site going within an hour or two of getting the download. Once the site was going, I read more, tried more, and learned the rest of the features by adding them to my test sites. I found XSitePro very easy to learn. The documentation is clear and concise, although long! There is a 100 page tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the features and functions. There is also a larger technical reference manual that I have never found the need to open.

Basically, you start by setting up a new project and then a site within that project. You have the ability to include multiple sites in projects. Templates are provided to get you started. You design your pages by using a control panel for header, footer, left-side, right-side, main panel, main panel footer, and page footer. Each of these sections is designed as a separate unit. The control panel for each allows you to select attributes for the section, including things like size, background color, and font. It also gives you the ability to go into an html editor for more customization. Once your page layout is designed, it becomes the layout for the entire site. This is great in that the site looks cohesive, but unfortunately, flexibility suffers somewhat when you want pages of a different design. (You can choose for each page whether you want to use the page template). If you have a 100 page site and need a couple unique looking pages, this is no problem. However, if you want 50 pages to have two columns, and 50 to have three columns, there is no easy way to do this.

Once your template format is done, you go to a page building section. For each page, you can choose whether to include it in side and footer navigation, use the page template, include it on the sitemap, etc. The page layout is also where some of the marketing features of XSP start becoming apparent. You can enter page keywords, and work with tokens to include the keywords in titles and text. Also, the meta tags for the page are entered in this section. There is a graphic page editor included to make it easy to design and build your page content. This is used to add pictures, tables, tokens, and formatting to your page. You have access to the html here also for further customization.

XSitePro builds the navigation structure for you. With each page, you can opt to include it in side and bottom navigation. Pages can be sub-pages of other pages, in order to help you build proper site hierarchy and navigation. You can also create pages from other pages, to aid in setting up sites with many similar pages. There are also tools embedded to make it easier to create a few detail pages for links, copyright notices, and a Google sitemap. You will want to be careful to change starndard text on some of these pages to avoid leaving a footprint.

One of the most powerful features of XSitePro is its ability to import files into pages. If you have articles stored in a directory, you can quickly import them, using formatting during the import that will add keyword tokens and titles, and make the pages consistant  in appearence.  You can use the importing features to create keyword optimized pages for very large niche keyword sites by using the tokens.

XSitePro is built for marketers, and has an “SEO wizard” feature that checks nine different attributes that would be beneficial for you to optimize. These are title, description, hearder1, all headers, all links, all images, top third, and complete page. It provides a report that offers suggestions for each of these attributes. This is a very powerful tool, and will aid in SEO tremendously. Also included are easy to use Adsense tokens and popup window building tools.

The “build” of the site is done locally on your PC. Then you can use the XSP publish feature to ftp the site to your web server. This is generally a fine process. The one weakness is that it becomes cumbersome if you tend to make a lot of minor changes to pages. The entire build and publish has to be redone.

The major strength I see in XSitePro is that is makes professional site-building quick and easy. A 100 page article site doesn’t take more than an hour or two to build, including the optimization needed to start marketing the site right away. The private forum of XSitePro users is full of strong web marketers that freely share their tips and tricks. The only real weakness I see is in the lack of design and building flexibility. XSitePro sites tend to have a very similar look and feel to them. If you like to mix design features throughout your sites, you may want to use a more customizable builder. Another thing I would like to see is flexibility in file storage. XSP builds the entire site in one directory, without the ability to use subdirectories.

Overall, XSitePro is a very powerful tool that should remain one of my primary site-builders for many years to come.

For more information, please visit XSitePro

Happy building,

David

 

Email comments, sugestions, complaints, etc. at: david@webtooltime.com