The excerpts above reflect my avid interest in all things Internet rather than my need to be a practical small business owner. When I set up my sites, I was more interested in exploring a new (for me) frontier than in engaging in Internet commerce. With those tasks accomplished, I went back to my day job and started wondering how I was going to maintain two websites in what amounted to my spare time.

I also learned my limitations with respect to website design. While moderately competent with the technical aspects of maintaining a site, I am a washout when it comes to graphic design. Even if I did have some graphic ability, I couldn’t handle the more sophisticated aspects of website design, especially when collecting information for, or pulling information from, a database.

I requested some advice from my daughter, Laura, who does website development for a small company in Brazil. She told me about a new product that her business partner, Mauricio Portasio, has developed, called xSite. She explained that once they put my website into xSite, I could edit the content, including pictures and hyper-linked text items, directly from the website. On top of that, the company’s graphics experts could redesign the layout to reflect a more professional appearance and to handle different screen sizes and browsers more efficiently.

You can see the results at jbmcdonaldandson.com and taichi-interactive.com. I’m very pleased with the graphic layout of my newly designed sites, but that’s not the best part. The best part is the ease with which I can update the site. These are the steps I go through to update a page:

1. Use a browser to navigate to my website.
2. Click the screen area that we agreed to hot spot (I know where it is; xSite knows where it is, but at my request, they hid the hotspot from my customers.)
3. Type my user name and password in the xSite login window.
4. Read the instructions on the “Welcome to xSite” window. Simple as the process is, I keep forgetting how it’s done, so once again I review the process.
5. My site is still visible, with the xSite info superimposed, so I use my site’s own navigation bar to click the link to the page I want to update.
6. I hold down the Ctrl button and hover the mouse over the section of the screen I want to update, and then click the left mouse button.
7. An edit screen appears. I update the text at if I were typing it into notepad. No HTML or other code required.
8. I click the “Update” button at the bottom of the edit screen.
9. My changes now appear on my site.
10. I proofread changes and correct typos, repeating steps 6 through 8 above.
11. I use the xSite taskbar to log out of xSite.

Editing text is simple, but sometimes you need to do more than edit text. For example, I might need to add hyperlinks or insert a picture or another page. This is also a simple process with xSite. Notice the item “[yongso]” in brackets on the edit screen. It creates a clickable “mailto” item for Dr. So’s e-mail address.

If I had a product catalog I wanted to update, I could use the “cloning” feature to insert a product. Clicking the “delete” button removes the item. Clicking the “clone” button creates a duplicate, which I can then edit to create an entirely new item.

When setting up user identifications and passwords, a business using xSite can assign different clearance levels for people allowed to edit the site. For example, in a small to medium sized business, the webmaster might have full administrator privileges, the marketing person might have access only to the “about us” page, and someone from the sales department might be responsible for the product catalog.

When she set up my Reluctant Cook online recipe book reluctant-cook.jbmcdonaldandson.com my daughter recommended that I allow users to set up logins and give them privileges to add recipes to my recipe list. She explained that we could limit their access so that they could not delete recipes, and even build in a delay so I would have time to review the recipes before allowing their display.

If managed right, the beauty of this system for a small business is that the site can be updated from any computer with access to the Internet. One of the biggest strengths of this system is the ability to correct an embarrassing typo in real time. I have created and/or maintained web site content for several different employers, and the biggest problem that we have had with our sites involved glaring typos and grammatical errors that don’t get fixed because the webmaster geek considers their correction to be a low priority task, and no one else has access to the files.

xSite has made my life much easier, and if I had learned about the company sooner, I could have saved myself other daunting tasks, such as registering domain names and locating a domain hosting service, as it offers all these services.

For anyone who is considering setting up a website, visiting the xSite website and experiencing the product demo firsthand could be well worth your time. See the demo.