Andrea Wilson’s Blog

I was planning to make my next tutorial a Camtasia video, but I was feeling rather stressed by that as video is not a natural medium for me. Writing is my strength, so I decided to do what I know and write a report instead. However, I did include numerous screen shots in the report so it’s very easy to follow.

What is it about? It’s a step-by-step guide to creating a basic, simple, but professional-looking template in XSitePro V.1. There is a need for simple XSitePro templates for all kinds of purposes: AdSense sites, affiliate sites, product review sites, landing pages, sales letters, practice sites, and so on. And it serves to teach concepts like simple rollover navigation, double borders, adding a table to the header section, setting up a template from scratch, etc.

I know V.2 is coming out May 20/08, but it’s going to be more complex to use than V.1 and the templates, while lovely, are not customized to your business. You will still have to customize them or have a custom template made. You will quickly start seeing the default XSP 2.0 templates all over the Web and soon realize that even a simple template customized to your business is preferable to looking like every other XSitePro user out there. And certainly preferable to — shudder! — typing your business name over a generic template header… no matter how pretty the design!

I just have the bonus report to do now and I’ll be offering this tutorial for sale. Not sure of the price yet, but it will be very affordable, for sure.

I still plan to tackle a project in Camtasia. Maybe I’ll use it to capture some tips for V2.0. I know I can help everyone with V2.0 as I was one of the beta testers so I already have a very good handle on how everything works. I will also be able to create custom templates and QuickPages for you.