Archive for 2005
No, Paul Smithson, the creator of xsitepro didn’t hold a gun to my head. I was cruising along with my blog and my other 5 or 6 sites - mostly produced with Microsoft Frontpage, Mozilla Composer and nvu, plus textpad and cuteFTP and things were going quite nicely.
[Xsitepro is not only a WYSIWYG web authoring tool, but also a complete site creation and management tool, including SEO functionality, FTP and much much more.]
That was until I got frustrated. I remember when I was so excited to earn 0.05c on the internet. It was like wow! The only problem being it cost me $138 dollars to make it. I’m not ashamed because I know you can relate. Then I made $20 dollars and it was like - cool - still cost me about $178 to make that, if I factored in all the info I’d paid for and various bits of software annuitized.
But I was having fun and that was the main thing - and seriously that was the main thing. I was creating and writing and having ideas and learning and communicating. This was life - a form of life anyway and part of life that more and more people are becoming part of.
I loved it. The girlfriend didn’t. Why are you spending all that time on the computer to make $2?
Well, I’d say - it’s going up and I’m learning more and I’m going to keep going and that’s that. You see I get pretty worked up about my goals. To me they are my sacred property to be cherished and nurtured. I think she detected that. She saw the passion or obsession and it struck a chord.
Now that my stats are climbing on a month to month basis she’s all for it and I was glad to be able to follow through.
Successful activity though forced me to search for more resources to keep the momentum going. You see when the stats are climbing you need to keep them going by doing more of whatever you were doing. What I was doing was building sites. Some were crap and didn’t do much but all believe it or not were profitable, just some more so.
One day I was sitting at the computer and I registered 23 domain names. Now I had a problem, I new how long it was going to take me to build decent looking sites with Wordpress, Frontpage etc and I would be still building them next year.
I’d heard of xsitepro and quite frankly I thought it was probably some hyped up program. I mean the sales page talks about duplicating site after site and making $1250 with each site. Well, to be honest that’s not my experience of sites. I’m happy if a site makes me $50-$100 per month on an ongoing basis, although some of my sites are doing far more - I just can’t predict which ones.
What forced me to buy it was 23 undeveloped sites and the prospect of building each one. Man that was slow freight. So I bit the bullet and forked out the $197 for xsitepro. Next day I made it all back anyway - sometimes it works like that. So I was already in front.
I have one criticism of xsitepro - it doesn’t handle tables very well - maybe I’m just not used to it - it’s a little different from Front Page - I’m sure they will improve it - this should definitely be done - but since they do regular improvements - I’m sure they will.
Apart from that - xsitepro is SWEET. It keeps your sites and projects so organized and I am a really disorganized person - but my xsitepro sites are not. Tasks like linking, redirect pages, google sitemaps,
sitemaps, adsense, code insertion, site wide style changes are all such a snap that it really does increase the site building process by a factor of 5 in my case.
If you are doing affiliate marketing it’s just fantastic - all you need to do is come up with the content and you can create a really tight little affiliate site that looks super-profesional. If you want to see my first site that I built with it go here - I’ll be adding more content to it. This was just using one of the basic templates. There are tons of templates to choose from.
I’ll probably build %90 of my sites with xsitepro - some of them are not suited to it - but heck I’ve still got frontpage if I need it.
The best thing about xsitepro for me is that I really do have the confidence that using it I can complete these 23 sites and have them cooking along. What that means to me personally is that it will take me to the next level of income and lifestyle and $197 is the best money I have spent on a web design program.
I highly recommend xsitepro.
website design software, xsiteproI’m just about through my research on Membership Site Software, having viewed most of the content management systems, (CMS), full design membership site offerings and membership site scripts and I’ve come up with the most likely candidate for my upcoming memberships site.
I plan to charge around $297 dollars for a yearly subscription and I estimate that I will easily get 500 members in the first year. So in terms of change we are looking at around $150000 gross. Not bad - maybe I’m dreaming but even if I do only a quarter of that - it’s still well worth it.
Now for a brief coverage of different membership software, there are CMS or content management systems which are not really custom built for the purpose and may or may not have the required functionality to handle subscriptions and other features I require.
Then there are full service membership platforms - look at around $5000 US, just to get started not including custom tweaks later on. Not a good idea for a startup.
Then there are little scripts that handle bits and pieces. But I don’t want to spend my time installing scripts and tweaking. I just want to focus on providing the content.
Everything else must be automated.
Well the bad news is I couldn’t find a perfect system that did everything I wanted at a price I could afford.
But the good news is - I did find a membership site software platform and service that does %99 per cent of what I want at a great price.
VisionGatePortal Software is my choice for my future membership site. It has the right combination of price and features and it’s mostly automated.
Here is the benefit set: I don’t think you’ll find one more comprehensive.
• Fully Customizable To Your Web Site
• Content Management & File Protection
• Member Management & Subscription Sales
• Full-Featured Forums With phpBB Option
• Registration & Password Protection
• Member Image Gallery Built-In
• RSS Content Syndication & Aggregation
• Polls, Surveys, Questionnaires & Results
• Automated Digital Download Sales
• Top-Tier Data Center and Bandwidth
• Sequential Autoresponders
• CPanel/eMail/FTP/Domain Management
• Audio, Video and Flash File Storage
• Categorized Web Site Link Directories
• High-Powered Web Site Servers
• News, Articles & Newsletter Publisher Tools
• Built-In Customer Support Ticket System
• Website Maintenance & Reporting
• Flash or Static Banner Ad Management
• Membership Driven Navigation Links
• Sales Page Editor & Split Testing Tool
• Event Calendar & Schedule Description
• Java Chat Option Available
• Online Video Training & User Guide
The pricing also includes hosting and they have 2 plans depending on how many members you have. I will be starting off on the startup plan and then expand upwards.
If you visit the VisionGatePortal site you can see some sites that are already using this software. I will be providing tutorial type info to a specific niche, and some of these sites are
already doing that. Funny thing was, I’ve heard of many of them before, but I didn’t know they were using this membership site software.
Most of the other membership software providers are literally charging an arm and a leg. In fact VisionGatePortal is underpriced in my opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised if they put the price up soon.
So there you have it: VisionGatePortal Membership Site Software is my choice for my upcoming membership site and is a cool tool.
More Info on Vision Gate Portal
Ever ended up with 20, 30 or 50 or more drafts in your wordpress installation? Currently Wordpress forces you to delete them individually, which on a dialup is a slow process. Well, I had over 100 drafts sitting there, how do you think I felt? Looking forward to the task of deleting drafts from Wordpress one by one. Not!
But Ken Villines saves the day with a great wordpress plugin to bulk delete drafts from your wordpress installation. Suffice to say, plugin install 1 minute, deletion task over 1 minute and the plugins still there for later use. Brilliant!
The plugin also allows you to change the author and category of the draft without leaving draft control.
Kens batch delete wordpress plugin is named Draft Control and can be downloaded here
batch delete wordpress, wordpress pluginICOOLTOOLS SAYS: don't risk your computers security with slow and cludgy IE - Get firefox now.
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