Takeaway Website Pro

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Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro is the expanded, 'professional' version of Mr Site's successful and ultra-simple Web site-creation tool.

Pros

  • Traffic-tracking and search engine optimisation tools, user-friendly

Cons

  • Price, not suited to amateurs, additional renewal fee

Bottom Line

As user-friendly as its predecessor, Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro is a well-designed program that enables small companies to create a basic Web presence with little hassle. It may fall between two market segments, however, offering a basic suite of tools that may frustrate ambitious businesses while pricing itself above home users. A bit of an enigma, then, but a high-calibre one that will suit a narrow group of users extremely well -- if they can stomach the pricey renewal fees.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 232.99 (AUD)

Determined to take the jargon and baffling complexity out of Web design, Mr Site launched its Takeaway Website product last year to widespread acclaim. By reducing the creation of a site to six simple steps, Mr Site Takeaway Website enabled tech beginners and the time-poor to build a simple Web site with the bare minimum of trouble.

But we suspect the sailing may not be quite so plain for this, the expanded Pro edition of Takeaway Website. Admittedly Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro remains a wonderfully intuitive program -- if you're willing to keep things simple you can throw together and publish a multi-page site in an hour or less -- and some useful features have been added to the mix.

It's just that the small businesses that constitute Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro's target market are likely to find the results somewhat over-simple, while casual users can't be expected to shell out $232.99 -- even though hosting and domain name costs are taken care of.

As before, with Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro the six steps required to create a Web site are easy to follow. You visit Mr Site's own Web site, enter your activation code and choose a URL. If it's available, simply confirm your choice and get started.

You'll be offered a large array of design templates, background colours and fonts. Then you decide how many pages you want to have to start with, and type in some content. There are built-in tools for adding pictures and downloads.

Finally, hit publish and check out the results. You may have to wait 48 hours before the page goes live, but you can see what it's going to look like and tinker at your leisure.

The whole process is refreshingly user-friendly -- as long as you keep things basic. But once we started adding html coding, things got a bit more confused -- Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro's content management system showed a certain tendency to mess around with our code between sessions. This is a common problem with such simplified Web-development programs, but we'd been led to expect better from Mr Site Takeaway Website.

To woo would-be Web entrepreneurs, Mr Site has added some simple traffic-tracking and search engine optimisation tools, and Mr Site Takeaway Website Pro's e-commerce facilities have been upgraded. These are impressive and easy to implement.

The $232.99 price is a big step up from the basic version of Mr Site, but like that program it includes a year's ownership of the URL. There is an additional renewal fee every month, however, so you'll be shelling out the same again in year two.

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