XSitePro 2.0 Review
A lot of people are fans of the new XSite Pro 2.0.
Even Splork from www.lostballinhighweeds.com sings its praises (and he doesn’t praise a lot of stuff at all, usually the opposite).
But I have to disagree with Splork on this one as I’ve found XSitePro 2.0 to be a big let down. Still I’ll give it a 7/10 because while as an upgrade from 1.0 it isn’t much better, but it’s still a good product, just didn’t live up to its hype and isn’t a great improvement over XSP 1.0.
XSite Pro is certainly a handy piece of software, don’t get me wrong. It is great for newbies (and even advanced people) who are trying to set up and design websites that make money (in particular article sites). But there are obvious problems with the software and for the last year we’ve been told that XSP 2.0 was going to be the answer to all of those.
One of the biggest, most annoying things about XSP is that the code it spits out is not great from an SEO perspective. It is heavily focussed on a table layout which is what is easiest for XSP to implement, if you wanted to get the same look using css and divs you are still going to have to know html a bit, which is frustrating as I thought that would have been done for you in this new edition of XSP (which is supposed to be focussed on internet marketers - ie people who care about loading speeds, optimization and so forth).
Seemed like the obvious next step, but no, still the same crap that needs a coder to go in and fix up. They should at least have given us the option. Yes I’m being hyper critical here of a good piece of software, but this has been a long time in the making, it is expensive, and it isn’t really much better than the original edition from last year (why pay more? why the hooplah over 2.0?)
XSP 2 also has trouble importing XSP 1 websites and takes a lot of fiddling which is another frustration of mine, although I hear they are almost finished fixing that.
Also, it’s really annoying how xsite pro makes it so difficult to remove a left hand menu (lets say you want to keep it on some pages, but not on others (e.g. ppc landing pages)). If you remove it, it removes itself from every page, which isn’t what is wanted. Yet if you decide to ignore page layout completely (the solution that XSitePro recommends), you lose all your settings, not just your menu, but your fonts, backdrop headergraphc, the works.
I admit XSP 1 and 2 are good products, don’t get me wrong there, as they are very good for newbies to use and make it fast and easy to set up article sites. I still say that I lean on the recommending XSitePro side as it is the easiest web design software to use and is particularly good for article sites. But I see no real great advances in xsitepro 2 that are actually going to greatly increase your $$$, so if you already have XSitePro 1.0, I wouldn’t rush out and upgrade if I were you.
If you don’t have XSP at all, and you are looking to build high quality affiliate websites, then yes it is fantastic for that. Just note my pet peeves above so you are aware.
