One of my passions is building websites. For years, I’d been building websites in the most laborious way – hand-coded HTML (and believe me, it was ‘on-the-job training’). I took this approach for a couple of reasons:

1. Learning HTML gave me greater control over troubleshooting problems when they arose
2. I didn’t want to suffer the expense or the learning curve of a program like Dreamweaver.

A few years back I purchased XSitePro web design software version 1. I fiddled with it a bit, but it was buggy and hard to use. I realized that while this was an application that held great promise, it needed further development before it could really be competitive. So it gathered some cyberdust on my hard drive.

Soon I discovered WordPress. I was impressed with both the ease of installation and the abundance of features available through plug-in modules. But as much as I love WordPress, it’s not always suited to the kind of site I want to build – for myself, or my clients. Many of the existing templates, for example, still look like ‘blogs’ – although this is beginning to change, thankfully.

But once a WordPress template is selected, I sometimes feel like I’m working inside a box that just won’t let me do certain things I want to do. I recently had a client who selected a gorgeous template that may suit most people right out of the box, but my client wanted different sidebar content on different pages, and this theme did not allow for that.

The theme author provided no support for this type of modification. Bottom line is that after a lot of research I figured out how to hack the theme to make the change my client wanted.

And while many of the free WordPress themes that are available are basic enough to work with easily, many more of them are very complicated and can be really difficult to work with. Not a problem if you want to stay within the confines of the theme’s default settings, but that’s rarely the case when I’m building a new website.

So I’ve realized that I need other alternatives to website creation. I had three basic requirements:

1. Ease of use
2. Flexible enough so that I could easily build something as simple as a landing/optin page, or a far more robust site
3. Fully-featured (lots of styles, easy graphic integration, autoresponder form integration, easy FTP process, etc.).

So I cracked open XSitePro 1.0 – and believe me, it had been so long since I last used it, it was stuck shut. Although I’d not been terribly impressed with this first version, I’d been hearing some great things about v. 2.0. I paid for the upgrade to version 2 of XSitePro website design software and got my download.

What I saw immediately were some vast improvements over the first version. While it has a comprehensive built-in help module, I found it pretty intuitive. With just a few clicks, I’d created my first ‘project’ – a complete website structure all set up, ready to start building, page by page.

Like any new ‘toy’, the first thing I wanted to do was just play around a bit – and my snooping revealed a huge selection of attractive, professional templates

A few more clicks around the application and I discovered a ’snippets’ library, which allows me to quickly add little snippets of code to easily add certain features to a web page – again, just a couple of clicks, and the element is inserted. Similarly, there’s a script library that allows me to pop in a script to allow my visitor to print the page, add the page to their ‘favorites’, and much more

It was apparent that a lot of thought went into the development of XSite Pro web design software, to make sure that it can meet the needs of a modern website. It provides for easy PayPal and Adsense integration, and it’s SEO-ready, with its site map, SEO analysis tool, and more.

Adding content is as easy as using a word processor. The WSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) lets me easily see what my page content will look like.

Once a website is ‘complete’ (with quotes because really, websites are dynamic and ever-changing – or should be), the process of uploading the site to my web host’s server was a snap. There’s a page on which you supply your FTP details, click on publish, and bam, done.

As much as I love this program, the XSitePro web design software application is not perfect. There have been some updates that were only available on the forum, and not built-in to the auto updater. All updates, critical and not, should really be available through the auto updater.

Also, I discovered that in editing some pages that may have involved trying to change the style of a headline – make it a different size or color for example – that if I backspaced through the existing headline, I sometimes lost my formatting. When I examined the HTML code for my page, I saw that some of the tags were messed up by backspacing or deleting a section in the WSIWYG editor. So I’d like to see the editing capabilities be a little tighter, but the company seems to be on top of many of these issues, and in fact welcomes feedback from XSitePro users.

I’ve also found tech support to be rather slow in their response time. Great people, and knowledgeable, but response time could be better. However, having a users forum that allows for interaction among XSitePro users takes a little bit of the edge off this shortcoming.

All in all, I’d give XSite Pro web design software 4.5 stars out of 5. I love the software, and the company cares about its customers and how to make its software better.

When I need a blog, I use WordPress. But for everything else, XSite Pro is my go-to application of choice.  Visit the site to check it out for yourself.