8.8

Mr Site Takeaway website Pro

Available for both the PC and Mac (from one box), Mr Site Takeaway website Pro is the perfect bundle for businesses or amateur website developers to create their own unique websites and best of all, it comes in one easy to use bundle. Throwing away all that techno jargon, this is a web based tool that comes with a plethora of features and templates to start your website in just a matter of clicks.

Features

• Your own .COM (e.g. www.yourname.com.au)

• Enhanced secure Paypal Shop includes stock control & shipping charges

• 50 email addresses

• Professional designs

• Create business cards and stationary

• Boost your position on Google

• Phone and email support

• hosting includes 600MB webspace

• Photogallery

• Contact forms

Although the program does a good job at taking away most complicated issues in starting your own website, you still need a little internet savvy to navigate and install the program. After a rather tedious registration process (activation code), our account and domain name were ready and the next step was creating our very own website.

It should be noted that the domain name does take a little time in getting recognised by the servers around the world and ours was up relatively fast. All Australian .com.au domains also need an ABN number to be registered but if you're looking for a .com domain, it does make things a little easier.

The next step is to choose one of the hundreds of pre-existing templates for your website. Even though the templates are rather professional, they do seem a little generic at the best of times, however for most people, this should be more than apt in creating an online presence.

Once you have selected your content, you need to customise your webpage by text content and it's a WYSIWYG type of interface which means "what you see is what you get" that is ideal for visual people. It even allows for easy uploads of photos and even a great online photo gallery.

Businesses will also appreciate the integration with Paypal and whether you're selling comics or plants, setting up your inventory, costs and shipping has never been easier. In terms of speed, the only issue that we had is that the files are hosted out of the UK and at certain times, we did have some lag for our webpage access, especially via the Mr. Site interface.

At the end of the day, Mr Site Takeaway website Pro has everything you need to get started very fast and requires minimal computer experience to create some impressive websites. Unfortunately you are limited to web space which is 600MB that could be an issue for some but with over 50 email addresses, including spam and virus protection, we still found this program quite useful. Of course unlimited bandwidth is another seller plus FTP support for those who want a little more control over their websites. Bravo indeed!

Editor's note: It should also be noted that Mr Site features some interesting SEO tools for getting your website ranked with popular search engines such as Google.