It’s true you don’t have to know as much as you did in the past.  It’s true many of these systems DO make things easier than they used to be.  It’s true the learning curve for a web development product like DreamWeaver is steeper.  However, at some level you simple CAN NOT get away from the necessity of some technical knowledge.

I was reminded of this when I attempted to actually publish my first XSitePro website.  Let me point out this is not a condemnation of XSitePro.  They just happen to be my most recent experience with this universal problem.

When you go to actually publish the site the system displays a screen that asks you to enter information you got when you set up your hosting account.  Unfortunately, the information web hosting companies send out can be quite different from host to host.  It depends on what software they use and how they have chosen to set it up.  These setup commands are the worst kind of technobabble.  They also must be entered Exactly right.  That means case, special symbols, etc. must all be correct or the command fails.  The failure error messages are extremely cryptic and may or may not relate to the actual problem.  There are to many variations for anyone to have a prayer of automating the process.

The first item they want is Domain Name.  For example, www.samplesite.com.  That’s easy enough, but are you sure you want to use the www part of that?  Would samplesite.com without the www be better?  The answer to that question is VERY technical but getting it wrong may reduce the ability of your site to rank well because the benefits of links may be diluted.

The next item is Home Directory.  The first time around I missed the note in the fine print which said “Unless you have a specific requirement this should be left blank.”  I filled it in with what I thought was the right information.  The software obediently published the site where I said it should.  Unfortunately, that was not  the folder you arrive at when typing the domain name into your browser.  So, even though the software said my site was published, it was in the wrong place and not visible.  Figuring that out required use of another program that let me look directly at the file structure on the server.  That’s getting a little technical

Now we arrive at FTP Directory.  The welcome message from the hosting service I use does NOT include this little tidbit.  I suspect the usual non-technical user might find /domains/samplesite.com/public_html just a little difficult to locate and enter properly!!

In other words, the idea a completely non-technical user will be able to quickly and easily publish a bunch of websites is a myth.  They are going to need occasional help from someone who does understand the technology.  Once you have a working example and a pattern to follow things will be easy until something changes.  Then it is an ugly problem that has to be dealt with again.

On the bright side, non-technical people frequently know about things that make good content. Many technical people, especially the young ones, don’t know anything except tech.  They can do all sorts of technical wizardry, but then look around and can’t figure out what to write about.  I think there is a tremendous opportunity for one technical person to support the technical needs of 15-20 writers.  That way both can do what they do best to the benefit of all.

A couple of years ago when I first started exploring the idea of selling reports online there was a system called the $7 report system getting a lot of promotion.  The author had figured out $7 was a price point with little sales resistance and was promoting a system to write and sell these kinds of reports.  We toyed with the idea but part of the reason we never went far with it was because the process of making your reports available for easy download we difficult.

XSitePro has a membership site with several videos, one of which shows exactly how to use one of their wizards to set up a system to sell online reports like this.  I have not personally tested it, but it seems very straightforward to set up and the process requires no technical knowledge.

For someone who wants to try writing and selling digital products this would be a really easy way to set up  your distribution system.

Their membership site indicated they were working on a video to show how to set up an actual PayPal shopping cart, but this won’t be as simple.  As soon as you start getting into all the choices required to make a viable shopping cart the process is bound to get complicated.

I think this makes a nice illustration of working within the design constraints of the software you buy.  This system was designed for buyers with zero technical skill.  If what the buyer wants to do was included in the system design parameters, sell digital copies of reports for example, it will work really well.

If the user knows more and wants something more elaborate, which is outside the design parameters, it can probably be done, but at the price of more complexity.  It always comes down to trade offs.  The question you need to ask is if you need the additional complexity.  When I ask myself that question I frequently find the answer is no.  I would be better off going with a simple system I could get running quickly.  Frequently features I am sure I will need turn out not to be that important.

I want to sell many (thousands) of unique items from a lot of websites.  XSitePro was designed for a user who wants to sell a few different products on multiple sites. This is such a significant design difference I am not sure it can be worked around.

When you enter a product for sale on an XSitePro website you can enter a description string, another string of your choice the currency (Dollars for example), and the price.  The form says you have to use PayPal’s global shipping options to deal with shipping and handling charges.  The description string does seem to handle a complex URL without difficulty so the idea of using the URL of the page a product is described on as the product ID works.

PayPal’s instructions and examples for setting up shipping options are not as clear as they could be.  I spent two hours working on them and still don’t understand exactly how what I set up on PayPal will interact with the data sent from my website when the Buy Now button is pushed.

These difficulties have forced me to think about exactly when and why I need real shopping cart software.  If you want to let customers purchase more than one item at a time you need a shopping cart.  However, the cart has to be able to handle item deletions when people change their minds, tax calculations which depend on location of the buyer, variation in product weight, variation in shipping speeds and a host of other factors.  Shopping carts are NOT simple.

I am not certain all that complexity is always needed.  I think most of my buyers will only buy one or two things.  Would it be so bad if they had to buy them one at a time?  It would cost me a little more because a part of the PayPal processing fee is charged per transaction.  I think that is such a small amount I shouldn’t worry about it.  If the buyer is purchasing five or ten items it would be a pain for them to have to supply their details over and over. Finally, the shipping charges should be reduced when multiple items are going to the same address.

I think in my circumstances there are non-shopping cart solutions to these issues.  If someone thinks shipping is to expensive I can post a notice I will refund any amount above actual cost.  That will cost me another PayPal fee, but only $0.30.  I can also tell buyers to send me an email with a list of items they want and I will package them up and send them an exact shipping amount.  Both of these “solutions” slow down the transaction and squash an impulse purchase.  I am not certain the buyers I expect to attract will be seriously put off by this.  Most will be Ebay shoppers who are used to paying at once and waiting a few days for their purchase to arrive.

Finally, not all the sites I plan to publish will sell products.  It may be worth purchasing XSitePro to use primarily to build content sites.  Time will tell.

It’s interesting that it is a site builder just like DreamWeaver in some ways. DreamWweaver is designed to allow experts to build and support large custom websites.  xSitePro is designed to help people with few technical skills rapidly publish many relatively simple websites.

They have some really easy ways to harvest content from article sites and rss feeds. They released version 2 in 2008, are offering a discount now, so I would guess version 3 isn’t to far away.  You can really see the scope creep.  Lots of handy features for building those cheap and simple sites.  But then more and more ways to add customization and more advanced features.

Try as they will, it still has a learning curve.  I tried to take one of their templates and make it match one of our custom templates.  I got most of it, but there were still several elements where I had not yet figured out where their settings are coming from.  The distinction between a color set by a background setting and one set by an image is frequently not obvious.  :)

xSitePro has a PayPal button service but it only does a buy it now button, and not a cart/view cart setup. We recently discovered and wrote about the value of using a specific URL as an SKU (Shop Keeping Unit). It’s exciting because it eliminates the need to develop a new system for tracking products which is one of the big headaches of running an online store. I don’t know yet how hard/easy/possible that will be with xSitePro.

They seem to have a pretty good handle on linking all the pages and automating the site map and navigation button setup.  There is also a reasonably intuitive system for adding keywords, descriptions, titles and all that kind of seo stuff to pages.  They seem quite proud of the siloing feature which is new in version 2.  I think it might work well for doing books where chapters have a lot of pages.  They do Amazon links, but not Ebay.  They allow adding code snippets so adding Ebay
should not be a big deal.  They have a search widget which I haven’t tried out.  I suspect it will be weak compared to G’s site search. Presumably the snippet feature would let you replace their site search with Googles.

Since it is a system that installs on your PC and is then uploaded the sites should not suffer from the update cycle like WordPress does.  They also assume from the start you are going to have a lot of sites and provide tools to manage and reuse stuff between them.  For example, they assume you will have collections of related sites and the first task is to set up a project, into which you add websites.

xSitePro websites don’t require a database. That means moving a website to a different server is much easier than it is to move a WordPress based site. Readers without much hosting experience will be shocked at how frequently hosting companies require customers to move their sites to a new or different server. It’s always a pain and if you have a lot of sites the time required can be a problem.

I think xSitePro might work well for a subject like my home security idea which will be mostly content pages rather than lists of products.  xSitePro comes closer to WordPress in terms of the ease with which you can change the navigation structure on the fly.  I see there are
tutorials on how to make WordPress a seamless part of your xSitePro site, but that looks like a shotgun wedding I want nothing to do with

To some extent it’s quite a lesson in how much work is required to have a software product ready to sell.  They have a 20 minute intro video that does a nice run though their system.  Then they have a 250page PDF to get into more detail.  Then they have a 1,000 page PDF that covers the real details.  For an additional fee (only $360/per year according to a forum poster.) they have a membership site with more videos, etc.  There has obviously been a lot of money spent developing the stuff.

Content management systems like this always gets into code at some point.  With xSitePro it’s the siloing feature where they say you have to be able to run php on your server, and give you a tool to make sure you can.

They have image gallery and slide show features I haven’t touched yet.