For a number of years now, I’ve been a user and fan of XSitePro.

The program is a domainer’s dream and could have been made specifically with domainers in mind. It was certainly built with the affiliate marketer in mind and that’s it’s real strength.

Using the in-built templates, it takes just a few minutes to get the skeleton of a web site up and running with XSitePro and adding content isn’t that difficult if you can use the copy and paste function on your keyboard.

The real attraction for me though, was the ease of adding affiliate links and Adsense to any site or any page on a site with the click of a button, Xsitepro storing affiliate links and banners with ease, for re-use again and again.

But times are moving on and although the team behind XsitePro are doing their best to keep up, I think there are now better options for the domainer, whose main job these days is to keep content fresh and appealing.

For that reason, I started developing my new sites with WordPress around last summer.

At first, I thought it was a bit daunting and also mistakenly believed that WordPress sites had to be blogs.

The biggest thing to put me off was that it looked incredibly difficult to get a WordPress site to look anything like what I thought it should look like. That’s when I discovered a program called Artisteer, which offers virtually limitless possibilities design-wise and is so easy to use.

Best of all, you can also use Artisteer to create templates for other content management systems and blogs like Drupal, Blogger and normal HTML sites.

Now I can get a site up and running using WordPress as I can using XsitePro.

The main advantage in using WordPress is that it allows me to add, edit or delete content from a web browser, meaning tat I don’t have to be sat at my own computer.

The number of plugins that extend the basic WordPress functionality is incredible and I already have a strong list of favourites that I include on every installation.

It was only recently that I discovered WordPress MU, which allows multiple WordPress sites, each with their own theme or layout, to be run from a single WordPress installation. I haven’t tried it yet, because I wasn’t sure about the SEO implications of doing so, but I’m pretty sure that it’s only the database and the physical server that have to be common, the IP addresses can be unique, at least I think that’s right!

In any event, WordPress has now taken over as my favoured development tool. The published result just looks sleeker and more professional than those I made using XSitePro.

As far as adding affiliate links and Adsense code, that’s easy too – there are plugins that enable you to do all of that.

The other difference between WordPress and XSitePro is that WordPress is free and so are many of the plugins.

Personally, I like to make a contribution for the plugins I like and use a lot because it keeps the whole development process going.

So all said and done, which is the better development tool for a domainer?

It’s an easy choice for me. I like XSitePro, but WordPress wins hands-down for its overall flexibility. It’s a little more difficult to get to understand initially, but there are plenty of places to get support, including the excellent forums.

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