XsitePro Experience

Comparisons of XsitePro to Site Build It is one of the more common discussion topics on the XSitePro User forum. So I thought I would share my experiences on porting my 3 year old SBI site to XSitePro.

Before I start I should say that I think that Site Build It (SBI) is great.  There is no better way into internet marketing and web site development while avoiding the pain of learning HTML.  SBI is much more than a site building tool - it is a whole suite of research, analysis, interaction and web development tools.  But you only get to build one site for your money.  In my experience, once you have been bitten by the internet bug you want to build lots of sites.  And that’s where the limitation of SBI begins to bite.

My SBI renewal was due. $300 for one site was simply too much to pay. Adding and changing pages took too long.  However, just about every top level page had PR 4 so I didn’t want to lose the linking power that provides.

Like many such activities I meant to do this over a period of weeks. In the end I did it over a couple of evenings right at the last minute.

First step - visited every page and saved them as ‘complete pages’. This saves all the graphics too so you don’t have to remember where you saved them all originally.

Second step - create an XSitePro site with a similar layout to the source site.  It won’t be exactly the same but that doesn’t really matter.  If you check the pages with the Search Engine Optimisation tool within XSitePro and adjust accordingly you will have pages that are just as well optimised as they ever were in XSitePro.  The precise look and feel is secondary.
Third Step - Viewed and then copied each SBI page into XsitePro. Quite a bit of work here to get the formatting looking somewhere near decent.

Fourth Step - Biggest job - sorting out the external linking - particularly to affiliate links.

you’ve then got to choose a suitable web hosting company.

Fifth Step - Selected a pretty low-priced web host. Didn’t go really cheap as the links this site provides are too important to risk with excessively cheap web hosts.

Sixth Step - Looked up SBI instructions for changing domain registration and DNS. Contrary to some people’s comments the process of moving the domain registration was straightforward. I had to get some information from SBI support and they were brilliant - really helpful. What’s more, the DNS servers had updated within 15 minutes.

Seventh Step - Uploaded web site to new host.

Eighth Step - Review and update the site.

Ninth Step - Repeat step 8 and keep on reviewing it.

Time taken - about 8 hours over a couple of days.

I am still working on the structure of the site. Now it’s on XSitePro it is really easy to make structural changes. There are still a few links that don’t work so I am working on these too.

It can be done - it just takes a bit of effort and time.