Product Reviews
"Site Build It"

First of all, let me say that doing a review of Site Build It (SBI) almost feels "blasphemous" because soooo many people are using it and apparently having success with it. Unfortunately I am not one of them.

In The Beginning

After procrastinating long and hard for several months, I finally purchased SBI in March of 2003 for the wallet-busting price of $478 Canadian (roughly $360 US).

Of course, my procrastination cost me more than a few bucks because there were several opportunities to buy it at an even lower price prior to my actually buying it.

I think what finally convinced me to buy it was the Brainstorming tool. I knew I needed something to research keywords with and Wordtracker was just too expensive to justify.

Soon after my purchase, I received the Welcome Email and proceeded to download the software and the HUGE Action Guide that comes with the software.

The Journey Begins

I began my SBI journey by reading the Action Guide (front to back as advised) and then again from the beginning. I wanted to be sure I did everything RIGHT so I could finally make some real money.

Then I started 'brainstorming' topics for a great new site. (Note: SBI includes a keyword research tool known as 'Brainstorm')

I brainstormed and brainstormed and brainstormed some more. And then I asked for a refund. You see, I was having a serious case of buyer's remorse and I could not come up with an idea or niche that interested me to save my life.

The Mistake

Here's where the knuckleheadedness comes out - I never heard back from Sitesell regarding my refund, which was interesting in and of itself. At the same time I continued to read great things about SBI, such as Allan Gardyne's SBI case study. Of course, by now I'm starting to think "if Rupert can do it, then I know I can do it! Maybe I made a mistake by asking for a refund."

In July of 2003, I sent Sitesell a message asking if I could still use SBI. (Did you think they would say "no"? Of course they didn't.) I began to do more brainstorming and found that the term 'home business ideas' was somewhat popular and somewhat under served.

"Yes, I've finally found it - e-home-business-ideas.com will be THE best website for biz ideas!"

I used SBI to identify all my relevant keywords and to set up the domain, which is included in the price of SBI. I was ready to create my site. But a funny thing happened on the way to site creation - I realized I didn't know a whole lot about home business ideas. Yikes! This is not a good thing.

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Dust Balls

Needless to say, SBI figuratively sat on the shelf gathering dust at that point. I was completely lost and more than a little depressed so I moved on to other projects where I could lose more money.

But dang it, SBI just wouldn't go away. Everywhere I turned there was a new article about someone doing great things with SBI. And I had to admit that the principle behind SBI was sound - cradle to grave site creation, promotion, and monetization.

By now, it was November 2003. I had recently signed up to use Wordtracker for a month to research some possible keywords for another project I was interested in. While doing my research, I discovered that the term "green house gardening" (with spaces) was searched for quite a bit and it appeared that there were very few websites coming up in Google. Could I be onto something?

"I better jump on this one before someone beats me to it", I thought. I was jazzed, I was inspired, I was pumped.

On The Road Again

I sent an email to Sitesell requesting that my current domain, e-home-business-ideas.com, be changed to green-house-gardening.com.

Sitesell replied that it would cost $50 CAD (~$37 US) to make this change.

"No problem - here's my credit card!"

Now I had a great new domain about gardening. Exciting, huh?

Unfortunately, the truth is that I have absolutely no interest in gardening. I hate to garden. I hate weeds. I hate fertilizer. I HATE everything about gardening!

But that's not going to stop me! Not this time. So I plunged head-first into SBI and my gardening website.

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Building Blocks

I found SBI to be an interesting and somewhat frustrating site building tool. It's sort of like creating a website using building blocks. You build web pages from the top down by inserting various 'components' (ie., blocks) into a blank page.

For example, first you insert a Title. Then you insert a Description. And you continue to insert components (headings, links, text, images, etc.) until you have a completed page.

I have to admit that the resulting SBI web pages are attractive, albeit a bit simple but clean. ( Here is my green house gardening site. ) What's interesting is that you'll see lots of SBI sites on the Internet and you can almost always tell that it's an SBI site by the look. They're usually pretty similar.

The other nice thing that SBI does is submit your pages to the major search engines. SBI is also smart enough to make recommendations on how to improve or optimize your pages for the search engines.

In Closing

As of this writing (April 2004), I have not made any affiliate sales from Green-House-Gardening.com and I'm not sure where the site is ranked in Google but it's definitely not on the first several pages.

But to be fair to SBI, I have not attempted to improve the gardening site since I finished it in late 2003. Why?

Because I hate gardening.

Overall, I give Site Build It a rating of 3 out of 5 knuckleheads.

I truly believe SBI will work very effectively IF you have a well-defined niche. All the SBI sites that are truly successful (and there are many) have this common characteristic. (Duh! How long have you heard that you must have a well-defined niche to be successful!!!)

Positives:
- Produces nice, clean looking sites.
- Automagically submits your site to the major search engines.
- Helps you optimize your pages for the search engines.

Negatives:
- Sites look very similar to each other.
- Building a site using the online SBI tool is cumbersome and slow.
- Sitesell recently raised the price.

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