I Dream in Colors

10/28/06 XSitePro - an unbiased review (for real)

Earlier this year, around march, i took a job doing some maintenence for a website. I will not link to the site, but i will tell you this: it was the damn most awful site in the whole internet. Last time i checked, the home page alone was 1.6 Mb of just text and the ocasional image (and that’s because i got tired of waiting and stopped it - i’m sure it’s larger). Don’t get me wrong, the job was pretty cool; good work enviroment, very flexible hours and great people. The pay, on the other hand, was ridiculously low. Think of a low number… ready?…





No, it was lower than that, seriously. Try again.





No, lower than that too.





And than that too.





Ok, we can be at this all day, so i’ll just keep going. So, the site was awful, built on FrontPage (the boss wasn’t stupd though, he once told me “ugly sites sell more. Have you ever googled ‘Ugly Websites’?”). Part of my job was to move this site to a new one, using this program called XSitePro. When i first interviewed for this job, the boss asked me “have you ever used XSitePro?”, in a sort of gloaty voice, like this program was the best thing since sliced bread (i think i also heard some fanfare too…). I didn’t know about it, but he assured it was easy to use. Needless to say, i hated the program every single day i worked there.

Last night i checked the website again out of curiosity. It reminded me of this XSitePro software, so i went and googled it. Here, look for yourself. Nothing but review after review, all with affiliate links at the bottom (pretty similar to the site i was working on to tell the truth - so there really is a market for these kind of things or, wouldn’t surprise me at all, the boss was also behind XSitePro…) . Even one titled Xsitepro - is this the only Honest Review on the Internet? has an affiliate link at the bottom, and it’s posted on several articles sites. I looked at 15 pages of a google search for “XSitePro review” and couldn’t find a review that looked… well… honest.
So, here it goes, an XSitePro unbiased review, for real.

Should you buy XSitePro?


No.


Why? Because if you’re thinking of buying this program, you’re on Windows (it’s not available for any other OS), and if you’re on Windows, you already have FrontPage, wich is pretty much as good at building websites as XSitePro (i.e. not good at all). It may have all those easy publishing tools, but the WYSIWYG interfase is awful. Good luck trying to stylize a link. And the code it writes is terrible. Three words: table based layout.

“But!”, you may say, “XSitePro has all those useful tools like SEO optimizing!” Ha, i laugh at that. It’s pretty much useless. There’s a reason why SEO specialists charge so much.

If you’re serious about your online business, either get a real WYSIWYG program (you can get some even for free) and spend some time learning how to use it, or pay someone who knows what they’re doing to do it for you.

I left that job after a few months, to start SnowyDay. Now i do my web design with the best HTML editor available, the Notepad.

Technorati Tags: XSitePro, notepad, html editor, build websites, ugly websites

Ramblings, Webdesign