You may have heard all the buzz about XsitePro from Intellimon - 'The internet marketers alternative to FrontPage and Dreamweaver'.
Are their claims about building multiple paged, quality, SEO optimized websites to be believed? Let's investigate the time saving features in more detail.
Page Layout One of the most time consuming tasks when creating a site from scratch is the initial page layout.
XsitePro speeds up the layout of sites by providing you with simple check boxes and drop down menus in order to produce a 'virtual master template' for all your pages.
Imagine that every possible option for laying out a page is there for you - color selection, header/footer options, left and right panels, backgrounds, links and navigation - and all you have to do is tick a box to make it active (or inactive) on any or all of your pages.
After selecting your options, you can generate a pre-populated preview of how the site will look in your web browser, and make any changes you like before you even start to add your own content.
It does not matter how many pages your site will have, you only have to go through this step once.
Similarly, any amendments to the site are automatically updated each time you choose to publish it.
Adding pages is a one button operation, and once you have added a page, you simply give it a name and fill it with content.
Page Options and Information Even when using a WYSIWYG editor, it can sometimes be very difficult to set up the information about each page properly (title, author, meta data, keywords) and it is not uncommon to have to go through several menu options before everything is set correctly.
With XsitePro, you have a single option page where you add all the relevant information for the page you are creating.
Site Maps and Navigation Menus An important part of any decent site is the site map and user friendly navigation.
Each time you create a page with XsitePro, you are given the option (yes, you guessed it - a check box!) to include that page in the navigation menu and can also set the instructions for search engine spiders.
If you have multiple pages on your site, you can set their position in the navigation menu and subcategorize them under section headings.
Each page created is automatically added to the site map (which itself is created by XsitePro with no intervention from you required).
If you wish, XsitePro will also create a Google (XML) sitemap to help get your site indexed quickly.
Adding and Formatting Content Good advice for any webmaster is to have all your content ready before you start to build the site.
It is much easier to create a text file or document and then paste the content into your web pages.
XsitePro has the capability of 'pasting from Word', whereby you can retain all formatting as is.
Even if you have pasted unformatted text, the formatting menu is very similar to that of a word processing program.
There are drop down menus for text alignment, font size and color, paragraph formatting, highlighting and bullet/numbering options.
There is also a spell check function to ensure there are no embarrassing spelling mistakes on your site.
If your page content is very long, you can also have XsitePro automatically chop it up into manageable chunks and create a breadcrumb menu to navigate through it.
Publishing XsitePro has a one button approach to publishing your site.
You do have to initially set up your publishing options, which takes a few minutes at most.
If you have purchased XsitePro, you can also have your sites hosted through their own hosting package, which simplifies the process further.
The Verdict The time saving features mentioned in this article are just a few of the many innovative solutions provided by XsitePro, but using these alone has shaved many hours off my own site building efforts.
My first attempt at building a site with XsitePro took just over 90 minutes to produce a 30 page site, which included the installation and setup process.
After several weeks of familiarizing myself with the features, I can honestly say that their claims of building a site in under an hour can be believed.
Although other software such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver will always have a place (and rightly so), for most of us out there, XsitePro will do exactly what we need quickly, efficiently and at a fraction of the purchase cost of Dreamweaver.
Even though Intellimon markets XsitePro at internet marketers, this should not put off webmasters who want to build any form of quality content site (hobby sites, family or club web sites which receive regular updates) and would rather spend their time working on the content rather than the construction.