XSitePro Website Design Software Message Board

OK, now I'm spitting the dummy.

I've just spent quite a bit of time with links and anchors being set up.

Everything was working great. Had a page with a lot of small images and text inside a table. Put an anchor in the text next to each image. Each small image was a link to another page which had a large version of the image. At the top and bottom of the large image I created text links that went back to the anchors.

All was working good - until I did the following. In the web page directory tree, I clicked on the right pointing button to make the small image page become a sub-page of the one above it. ALL OF THE ANCHORS DISSAPPEARED. Can I not change the position of the page in the page directory tree without something major like this happening. Is it too much for the software to deal with.

I'm getting tired of the bugs in this software. I've had table formatting problems where the cells shift out of position. Undo button won't undo. Can't delete or cut selected text, had to use backspace. Can create one link to an anchor but not a second link so have to add a second anchor at the same point. These are just the problems I recall off the top of my head.

Look I think this software is fantastic and it has allowed me to build my first website. But I find it very BUGGY and now I'm starting to wonder if I can rely on it for continuously updating / changing my website without stuffing something up.

This is the first time I have read a post on this software being "buggy" by anyone. If anything, this is the most trouble free software I can ever remember buying.

I doubt if you'll be banned, but I'm sure many people will disagree with you. I've been using it for four years now and it's the easiest thing I've ever used. Bar none. Good luck though!

Guess I was expecting replies like these. Most people are satisfied or very happy with Xsitepro. I'm trying to be one of them.

Perhaps I am just unlucky but these things have happened. Unless of course I imagined them or I am lying through my teeth. And I'd be a complete idiot to do that because the majority of users, like I say, are quite happy.

I would like to know though: What could cause ALL of my anchors to vanish from the cells in the table. Like I said after all the links & anchors were set up and working, I changed the position of the web page in the page directory tree. I clicked the right pointing button to make the page a sub page, and voala, all anchors gone.

If I've done something wrong I'll take back my words, but people cannot disagree that I experienced what I did. And thankyou for the good luck wish, I'm feeling like I need it at the moment.

I don't think you're lying at all. I totally believe you can have issues with using tables. It's why I personally don't use them on my sites, but then again, I don't need to. It may or may not be the best platform for using tables. As a general html editor though, especially for internet marketers, I think it's a great program.

Hi Beefy,

I came also across these "bugs" and believe me, there are realy bugs!!!!!!!!! I'am looking forward on a good update, but it is very still... inside Xsitepro!
Keep up the good work, greetins from a rainy Holland, Jeroen.

Greetings too Jeroen (hoe gaat het).
Nice to know I'm not the only one who has experienced some bugs.

Hjaynes you say you don't use tables because you think there can be issues (buggy ?) with their use. I'm a bit confused now because from what I've read, users far more experienced than myself say Xsitepro is a table based system, and that's the backbone of the layout method. The major issues I've had have been in tables, even not being able to delete or cut selected text was when it was in a cell. Come to think of it all the work I've been doing lately has been in a table.
So you've been using it for four years and your experience is keep away from tables because of potential issues (that's what I call bugginess).

CaptainBob, here you are then. Three mentions of bugginess from three users, all in one conversation. I see you've been a forum member for a whole month. I find it hard to believe you've been around the software a long time yet have only just joined the forum. I've been using it since 2009 and have seen others reporting various issues, although mostly minor irritating ones that generally can be worked around. Just because you have not heard of bugginess issues does not mean they never happen.

So at this point in time I'm concluding that tables are temperamental and unreliable, and their use is best avoided. Now I have to figure out how to do that. Perhaps I can make single row tables with 2 cells - text in the left and image in the right cell. Then I can put my anchors inbetween tables as I go down the page, and hopefully that makes them more stable an less prone to vanishing.

Beefy

Hi, Beefy,

Truthfully I don't know any bugs with the tables in XSitePro. Although, they may be a little tricky to work with at times (turning the border on temporarily helps a lot). I've also never encountered an issue with selecting or deleting text in a table cell. Since EVERYTHING in XSitePro is in a table cell (even though that might not be obvious to the casual user), this would render XSitePro unusable! Since most XSitePro users are not versed in CSS, which is how you can align images and text without tables, tables are very important for XSitePro users. They are not to be avoided at all.

_________________
Andrea Wilson

1. Custom XSitePro Templates. XSitePro Consulting and Training. FREE TIPS!

2. Off-the-Shelf XSitePro Templates! Versatile designs. Easy to manage and maintain!

3. AllWebMenus Pro and XSitePro Work Perfectly Together! NEW!

Hi Andrea,

thanks for that info (and by the way I like the video I purchased from you about unique headers for each page).

I might go as far as re-installing Xsitepro, and even disabling my security software when Xsitepro is running and see if that reduces the issues I have encountered.

I too had never encountered the issue of not being able to delete or cut selected text until a couple of days ago. Seems like I got a bunch of issues in one hit. Hopefully the sunshine will come out after the rain ......................

Beefy

Hey Beefy,

I actually understand what your experiencing and where your coming from because these "bugs" have also happened to me in the past.

When I first starting using XsitePro I had problems with the footers and info bars of my current XsitePro template randomly switching to those of the wrong template. I had to completely re-install both Xsitepro and the resource pack several times until that issue went away. (I actually don't remember if it ever stopped because now I create my own templates instead of using the default Xsitepro ones.)

Later on I was having trouble with XsitePro not saving my recent changes so I had to try and find everything I changed and make sure it was correct. This issue has seemed to be fixed from past updates.

Currently I am using XsitePro with little issues other than a small bug that I found and reported to support when siloing.
Then there is of course the known issues with Pinedit and it's useless code.

I do very much like XSitepro being a novice at internet marketing and for making more advanced techniques simple and easy to set up. I also appreciate the support from Ben and others at the forum such as Jason, Andrea, and Copywolf who are willing to help when I need it, although the lack of traffic at this forum has never impressed me.

I believe I'm finally starting to use a more non-buggy or "clean" Xsitepro however I do fully agree with Copywolf's statements about bringing Xsitepro "to the next level."

I can't help you with your specific problem and it does sound very frustrating so my advice would be to send a ticket to support and see what they have to say and more importantly never give up.

Goodluck

Here's the latest beta version. For those of you experiencing recent issues it might help. Conflicts with other recently installed software might be an issue, too, or a corrupt database in XSitePro. For the latter, try exporting and re-importing your site to see if that helps.

http://licensing.intellimon.com/xsitepr ... ate546.exe

_________________
Andrea Wilson

1. Custom XSitePro Templates. XSitePro Consulting and Training. FREE TIPS!

2. Off-the-Shelf XSitePro Templates! Versatile designs. Easy to manage and maintain!

3. AllWebMenus Pro and XSitePro Work Perfectly Together! NEW!

Xrocker30 - thanks for the moral support, I need it. Business this year has died as though I've barely been in my industry, so I'm racing against time to get some marketting going. My website will be a big part of attempting to convert potential customers to paying customers. Lots of photos, explanations, etc about my industry. I was getting niggled with issues with anchors and links but I worked around those issues and got them all in place. But when a lot of your work just vanishes like that you can start twitching. Then I try to get on the forum immediately to ask for help and my log in details wouldn't work any more, I had just been on the forum a few days before. Think that was the dummy spitting point. I finally get back on the forum after being issued a new password, put in my first post as shown above then get answers which make me feel like I am the problem. So yes I'm glad that some others have chipped in to let me know they also have experienced less than perfect situations. I feel thinks like this should be heard as it all contributes to Xsitepro becoming better.

Andrea - thanks for that link and the tip about exporting and re-importing. I'll also take note about the tip on leaving borders turned on while working with tables. That is interesting because I've been using the tables for layout only and so took away any borders as soon as I set up the tables. Perhaps that contributed to the lack of stability. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm guessing you're saying leave the border in the table setup until you've finished everything then take the borders away right at the end.

Hi beefy,

You really hit the mark of how I feel with these two quoted phrases. It's seems like for everyone else XsitePro is perfect and never has any issues other than what the user causes. This myth has really caused me to mentally give up in the past so I'm glad I was able to reassure you that it's not ONLY you to go through this. I truly hope your business picks up and does well.

-Xrocker30

You have got to be kidding

I have had many bugs with Xsitepro - support is pretty slow to respond too

[Beefy: yes, leave the borders turned on so you can more easily grab the table for resizing and see the individual cells. Turn the borders on and off as you need to. But you can also simply right-click anywhere inside the table to get to the Cell Properties and the Table Properties. You can resize the table or table cell using the properties and do all kinds of marvelous things using the Style tab (which adds CSS to the table).]

A little advice that I give my clients...

At all cost, avoid adding content from MS Word into XSitePro. MS Word's proprietary formatting will mess you up royally. Even the "Paste from Word" option on the XSitePro menu won't save you from this. If you must use MS Word, copy the content into a text editor first and then into XSitePro. The text editor will strip out the formatting. Otherwise, just type directly into XSitePro and format your text using XSitePro's own text editor.

One of the other things I stress to my clients is that learning a little HTML and CSS will make your life a lot easier. While you don't HAVE to know HTML to use XSitePro, it will make it a lot easier for you to understand what XSitePro is doing and how to troubleshoot it when things seem to be going wrong. Example: You look in the Source tab and see a long string of non-breaking ( ) spaces that you've added, and you understand what that is doing to mess things up for you! If you don't know what non-breaking spaces do, you won't understand why you should NOT use longs strings of them.

CSS is the way to style your text, images, tables, etc. to ratchet up the professionalism of your design and content. It enables you to define/refine things down to the pixel, whereas HTML is more "clunky."

One of the reasons those of us who are very heavy users of XSitePro don't run into many problems is that we were already Web designers when we started using XSitePro. We thoroughly understand HTML and have a good working knowledge of CSS, so we know what is going on "under the hood." That helps a lot.

Every HTML editor basically works the same way, meaning they all do the same things, just using different interfaces... and with different degrees of ease and flexibility. Coding by hand has the most flexibility! Dreamweaver is the software application with the most flexibility, but it's expensive, has a steep learning curve and doesn't come with all the wizards, automatic menus, and SEO support that XSitePro comes with. And Dreamweaver is just not as quick and easy to use as XSitePro, even once you've learned it.

After Dreamweaver, there's really nothing much to compare to XSitePro. XSitePro was listed as one of the top 50 Web design tools in the May, 2012 issue of Website Magazine. Artisteer and Site Build It weren't even mentioned. XSitePro was listed ahead of Kompozer and way ahead of EZGenerator. CMS tools like Joomla and Drupal that were listed ahead of XSitePro are a nightmare to use! I have tried several of the other editors that came ahead of XSitePro on the list because I feel I need to keep up with what's going on in the industry and because clients sometimes ask me about these other products... and I have always come running happily back to XSitePro.

I think in the six years I've been using XSitePro I might have reported two or three genuine bugs. All software has bugs. I worked in the software industry for seventeen years, supporting multi-thousand dollar and multi-million dollar software. And these products had bugs! Sometimes serious ones that cost clients thousands of dollars in lost revenue or overtime. You can never test complex software under every circumstance that it will ever be used in, nor with every piece of hardware or software that might be installed on a user's computer, nor can you anticipate every combination of keystrokes that a user might execute.

And some bugs or quirks just never seem to go away! Why? Often because of the underlying architecture of the software that the developers can't do anything about without rewriting the application from scratch... not easy and very expensive. For instance, XSitePro uses a text editor called PinEdit. It's a third party product that the XSitePro developers don't have any direct control over. It would not be cost-effective for Intellimon to develop their own text editor. So, we have to live with any quirkiness that PinEdit exhibits until the developers of PinEdit send out updates or bug fixes.

Yes, we should expect timely bug fixes from XSitePro, but not every bug or quirk can be quickly or easily fixed. And not everything reported as a bug is actually a bug. Some of these are "works as designed," some are due to conflicts with other software, some are due to "operator error," some are due to data corruption, etc.

_________________
Andrea Wilson

1. Custom XSitePro Templates. XSitePro Consulting and Training. FREE TIPS!

2. Off-the-Shelf XSitePro Templates! Versatile designs. Easy to manage and maintain!

3. AllWebMenus Pro and XSitePro Work Perfectly Together! NEW!