When I bought Xsitepro 2 I basically bought it because I was having so much trouble with Wordpress and a certain guru was touting Siloing as a be all end all solution to getting ranked. I thought if I was going to compete I had to silo all my sites and my search engine rankings would increase exponentially. The fact is sites rank fine without siloing as long as you do the right things, now I’m not saying that it doesn’t give you a boost but I haven’t tested it enough to see a difference.
A couple days ago I went back through one of my old ebay affiliate sites and found that siloing was actually hurting my income. The way Xsitepro 2 builds the siloed menu’s makes it very difficult to navigate through the pages if the user doesn’t know what they’re doing. I’ve always learned to apply the KISS theory to websites and I think that it applies here.
After two days of un-siloing the site my click-through-rate to eBay doubled on this particular site. I haven’t seen any sales yet but if twice the people are finding my auctions and clicking through to eBay my odds are good.
The lesson here is to go back through your past assets and spend a little time as a user. Looking through the site like the customer will help you in all aspects of your business and aid you in your #1 long term goal - to make money
For those of you who came here to learn when to Silo your site I would again recommend thinking about your site as a user and how it will look if they land on any given page and try to navigate back. If it doesn’t make sense or they’re going to have a difficult time getting back to important areas of your site don’t silo it.
I just went through one of my old conduit sites doing some housekeeping and discovered a simple thing I overlooked that could easily boost my rankings.
What I discovered is that I hadn’t done a www. rewrite before and was getting hit by a duplicate content penalty.
If you don’t know what this is, Google thinks that http://yoursite.com and http://www.yoursite.com are two seperate sites and indexes them as such, thus giving you a duplicate content penalty because there’s two seperate and identical sites on the web and Google doesn’t like duplication.
The Fix is to modify your .htaccess file to include this code:
To modify this file you can login to your Cpanel and then click on File Manager, the trick here is to make sure the checkbox that says, “show .hidden files” or something along that line is checked. You’ll then see your .htaccess file there and then click on it and edit it adding the code above.
Just make sure you replace “www.yourdomain.com” with your real domain
I just added a new video tutorial on creating a blog to use with Xsitepro 2. It takes you step by step through installing a blog through your cpanel, seeing if it workes, and then adding it to your Xsite Pro 2 website.
I’ve created a free membership site for people looking to learn how to use Xsitepro 2. As of this writing it includes three high quality video tutorials on how to modify and create Xsitepro 2 Templates, as well as two templates I’ve made using the techniques in the videos. You can get access to it to the right of this post.
I’ve already had a couple people take me up on my offer and I just wanted to say thanks for joining my newsletter and I’ll be adding more Xsite Pro 2 Tutorials and Training as time goes by.
I recently purchased XsitePro to Wordpress because I’ve been tired of creating XsitePro 2 sites adding blogs and then having them look completely different. I’m probably a little bit of a tweak when it comes to that though, as I always prefer a clean simple style.
The purchase price for XsitePro to Wordpress is around $49 at the time of this writing so I thought that was a bit high At First!
It comes with a
60 page E-book covering all aspects of conversion
7 concise videos on each step of conversion
A code text file with the code you’ll be modifying.
Overall it’s a pretty simple job that most anyone with a little bit of time, a text editor and a bit of tenacity can accomplish. It took me a couple hours on my first one, and then about an hour on the second one, but many people could probably do it much faster if they’re good at following directions. I ran into trouble on some of the copying and it spit out jumbled code which Wordpress apparently has a hard time reading Myles helped me out through support and it was soon worked out.
Overall $49 is a small price to pay for continuity between your site and your blog. Myles O’Reilly and Karol Thor have really made a step-by-step system anyone can follow to create Wordpress templates out of XsitePro 2 templates. I highly recommend this to anyone who is searching for a way to bring their site and their blog together.
A Look at the Finished Product
Update 12/6/08: I’ve noticed an increasing amount of traffic making it to my main sales site after the conversion using xsiteprotowordpress. I highly recommend it.
The developers of XsitePro 2 have really disappointed the Mac community by not programming it using the Adobe Air platform or creating a second Mac friendly version of the software. Fortunately for me I found a way around their mistake and can still use the program on my Apple. The answer came in the guise of a Virtual Machine created by the good people at VMWare.
VMware Fusion allows me to create a Virtual Windows Machine on my Mac, which in turn allows me to run XsitePro 2. When I first installed it I was quite surprised by how good Windows actually ran, much better than on my old HP. Now I’ve become used to it and run a bunch of programs at once with very little slow down. You can actually run Windows in full screen mode and still use Spaces for Mac - a huge time saver.
Man do I love Leopard!
Another great outcome of installing Windows is that I can run other Internet Marketing Windows based programs. You too can achieve a similar outcome if you purchase VMware Fusion or Parallels. I haven’t tried Parallels but from the research I’ve done they’re nearly the same.
