Category Archives: Website Building

Website Design Software

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If you’ve noticed, one of the offers I have on this site is for XsitePro (now XSitePro2). Also, if you’ve read more than a few of these posts, you’ll know that I don’t promote anything unless I either use it, and like it, or I know enough about it to recommend it knowing it’s a good product or service.

In affiliate marketing you’re going to have to eventually set up some Websites, regardless of what you might read. There are some ways of making money without doing it, by using Squidoo, HubPages or something similar, but it really comes in handy being able to register a domain and being able to get a site up and going, the way you want without having to pay someone.

I’ve posted about XSitePro2 before because it’s a fantastic product. I’ve tried several other of the WYSIWYG type editors, and it beats them…hand down. I will say that Dreamweaver is about as good as it gets, but it’s also very high priced and has a VERY STEEP learning curve. There’s also nothing that you can’t do with XSitePro, so I can’t see spending that kind of money and going through the headaches buying Dreamweaver.

If you get into PPC or even if you just mainly use organic search, you’ll probably find yourself setting up a lot of sales pages. Just for this post I set up a sales page using XSitePro2. You can have a look at it by clicking this XSitePro Sales Page link. A lot of it I ‘borrowed’ from the corporate site, but I was able to generate that page in about 20 minutes or so. It’s quick, easy and you’ll be able to become productive in a matter of minutes instead of hours. There are many advanced functions that you can do, so there’s obviously things that you’ll be learning for a long time to come.

If you want the best priced, easiest to learn, most powerful WYSIWYG Website building tool…you have to try XSitePro2.

Web Development Software

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I just finished setting up a sales page for a PPC campaign that I’ll be launching soon. It wasn’t technical, just a sales page with some (I hope) decent copy, several images, and I’ll also be adding some articles and links to other informative authority sites.

The reason I mention this is because it was almost nothing to set up using XSitePro 2. This isn’t just a post promoting XSitePro however. It’s mainly to say that although I know some (basic) HTML and CSS, when there are so many programs available that can let you do the job in a fraction of the time, why not take advantage of them ?

I started with a free WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program called Nvu (view). I immediately upgraded to KompoZer when I saw Nvu was no longer supported. KompoZer is basically Nvu with some of the bugs fixed.

There hasn’t been an upgrade in some time, at least that I’m aware of, so I’m not sure what the future of KompoZer is. In March 2007, KompoZer was featured on Download.com’s round up on the best free alternatives to Adobe CS3, where it was favorably compared to Adobe Dreamweaver.

So even if you can’t presently afford to buy a fantastic tool like XSitePro, download something like KompoZer or maybe even a better option would be Amaya from w3.org (W3C). That’s the World Wide Web Consortium, the entity that comes up with the standards for HTML, CSS, XML…all that kinda stuff that I really don’t stay up on.

I actually haven’t used Amaya enough to have an opinion on it other than to say it appears to be reliable, thorough, and well written. I’m sure that there’s a lot of expectations considering where it originates. I do know that it’s updated regularly and in between major upgrades they have what they call ‘snapshots’, just minor updates.

Amaya will help you to create and edit HTML, CSS, and most recently, XML files. Work started on Amaya in 1996, so I’d say it’s got some development hours behind it.

Amaya is an open source software project hosted by W3C. The current version, released on February 29, 2008 is at 10, with a snapshot update that was added on October 17, 2008.

Distributions are available for Linux, Windows and now MacOS X PowerPC and Intel.

So if you’re creating Websites, use every tool available to make your job as quick and easy as possible. There’s many out there, oftentimes there’s an open source program available that will perform the task at hand, sometimes as well as any purchased software.

P.S. Another fantastic open source program for the Web Developer is Gimp. It’s a graphics (image manipulation) that rivals PhotoShop, in case there’s anyone that isn’t familiar with it.

P.S.S. If you do decide to purchase a WYSIWYG HTML editor, I would seriously consider XSitePro 2 moreso than Dreamweaver. Although Dreamweaver is an extremely powerful piece of software, it has a very sharp learning curve, and a very substantial price tag. I’ve owned and used XStitePro 2 long enough to be highly impressed with the features this software has. Look at the brochure here or the features here and you’ll see what I mean.

PHP is Something You Should at Least Be Familiar with

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How To Spice Up Your Site With PHP

I don’t have a vast knowledge of PHP programming, but I have come to realize the convenience of knowing something about it, not to mention the money you can save by not having to pay a programmer $25-$50 just to install a script, or up to $125/hour for a custom script!!.

Obviously this script (WordPress) was written in PHP, and so are many, many other popular programs on the Internet.

I purchased a book on PHP a while back, it’s called PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy by David Powers. It’s a fantastic book, and one that I didn’t actually fall asleep reading every time. I have many books on programming, and sometimes they’re so technical that I really have trouble following them without getting so bored I never get through a third of the book. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Anyway, it really does come in handy knowing at least some PHP. If you’ve ever tried to install some scripts you’ll know what I mean. Of course WordPress doesn’t count, we all know that’s a couple of clicks from Fantastico to to be up and running.

If you’re doing Affiliate Marketing, or just setting up Websites for whatever reason, you can save yourself a lot of headaches, not to mention a lot of money, if you learn at least some PHP…and actually some knowledge of MySQL doesn’t hurt.

As much as I like PHP Solutions, I just ran across another great resource for learning the basics of PHP, especially if you’re a beginner. It’s called Simple PHP, and it’s fantastic. It’s in digital form (eBook), which means you can get it immediately, but even better than that…between the Simple PHP Volume 1 videos and the script installation tutorials, there’s 7 hours of training and about one gigabyte of downloadable materials!! Pretty impressive, I’d say.

I love videos because I’m just able to follow them better, not to mention I retain so much more than when I just read the material.

Also, instead of having to read for an hour just to get ‘Hello World’ to display, you actually start doing something interesting in Chapter 1, Page 1.

There’s also 22 ‘code snippets’ included in the book, and the author shows you how to install popular scripts like ‘Adtrackz’, ‘EasyClickMate’, and others.

One of the other great things about this book is, with the knowledge you’ll have after completing the book, you’ll be able to install any of the many thousands of free scripts available on the Internet. There’s a nearly endless supply of scripts out there, but if you can’t even understand the programmer’s installation instructions, they’re pretty much worthless. So by just having all those free scripts available to use, it will open up so many possibilities for you.

The author covers every line of code on every page in the book, in the videos!! I can’t imagine anything being better than that. That’s actually better than having the instructor there with you because you can rewind and play as many times as necessary.

I’ll shut up now. I can’t say enough good things about this product. Click here to go have a look for yourself. You’ll be sold from the testimonials alone.