An Affiliate Marketer from the Ground Up

If you’ve ever read this blog before, or even if you haven’t I guess, you’ll know that I absolutely love XSitePro2. I was hesitant to buy at first, mainly because I hadn’t seen the product advertised a lot. I would occasionally see an ad on a blog, or maybe in a forum post signature, but never did I see it to the extent of say, Dreamweaver.

Which leads me to my next points. For the money, I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t be pleased with the quality and capabilities of XSitePro2 versus Dreamweaver. I realize Dreamweaver is considered the industry standard, but for what I’m interested in, XSitePro2 fills the slot perfectly. It’s less expensive than Dreamweaver, much easier to learn, and does everything I could ask for.

If you know you need Dreamweaver for whatever reason, then by all means, buy it. If it’s a compatibility thing though, XSitePro2 does have an export to Dreamweaver function that could be just what you need.

This isn’t a tutorial on XSitePro2, or even any kind of features list, but if you’re looking for a reasonably priced, easy to learn, powerful, WYSIWYG website builder, XSitePro2 could be exactly what you’re looking for. With it’s excellent support, updates and user’s forum, it’s a real value and great addition to any marketer’s toolbox.

Oh, the testimonial I mentioned wasn’t my own, but this one from PV Advisor, a well respected U.K. publication. I believe it sums up XSitePro2 very well.

In case you don’t go to check out what PC Advisor has to say, here are a few quotes:

“Getting a good-looking site up and running within minutes is
very simple.”

“Where XSitePro 2.0 really stands out is by applying this ease
of use to a wide range of additional features which, if coded by
hand or created using Dreamweaver would be considerably more
complex.”

“This is one of the most pleasant to use interfaces for web
design that we’ve encountered.”

Having used this software for quite a while now, I have to agree with every comment made.

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.

Since you’re looking at an affiliate site, I have to assume you’re interested in affiliate marketing, and therefore needing to setup a Website, if you haven’t already. If you’re like me, you like doing things in the most efficient way possible. I do know ‘some’ HTML, but not enough to setup a really good looking site. Especially considering I don’t know CSS, javascript or php.

The top of the heap as far as setting up a site using a WYSIWYG editor is DreamWeaver. It’s obviously a great piece of software to have. It’s also very expensive, at least as far as my budget is concerned.

I’ve looked around for an open source alternative, and the best that I’ve found, although I haven’t really tested others, is Kompozer. I’m going on many recommendations and reviews though. It’s actuallu Nvu with a big part of the bugs worked out. As the development team calls it…”Kompozer is…the unofficial bug-fix temporary upgrade to Nvu until the next version of Nvu is released”. – forum.nvudev.org/

It’s has a clean, functional interface, and does nearly everything that you could want, including CSS.

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