ALKHOBAR, 9 October 2007 — While the number of Internet users in the Kingdom has been increasing, encouraging Saudi-based individuals and businesses to have an online presence has been more difficult and setting up e-commerce websites, especially for small Saudi businesses and individuals, has been nearly out of the question. But there’s now an excellent software product that can help everyone create an online presence.
It should be mentioned that to have a website, it is first necessary to own an Internet domain and a website hosting account. A domain name, purchased through an online registrar, generally costs less than SR100 annually and a website hosting account typically costs about SR35 monthly. Plus you’ll need an Internet connection — broadband preferred.
Next, to create the website — even if you have no programming skills at all — you can use the first-class software product WebSite X5. Arab News downloaded the product from the Internet, ran through the WebSite X5 online tutorial and built a demo website in an hour. That’s correct — one hour from nothing to website. Then, we started playing with some of the advanced functionalities of WebSite X5 Evolution Edition and estimated that we could have had a very attractive e-commerce site up and running in half a day. We went strictly by the instructions demonstrated in the online tutorial. It was simple click, drag, drop to create the website.
Incomedia is the company behind Website X5. The software comes in several versions. The Compact Edition is a completely visual software, structured as a guided intuitive process, that in just five steps allows the user to create, customize and publish attractive websites. The Evolution Edition includes all of the features of the Compact Edition plus an e-commerce form pre-set for credit card payments, 3D button editor, FTP engine and tools for the creation of a reserved area, Feed RSS, multi-language sites and graphic editor to touch up images with the application of filters, frames and masks. Both the products create sites in XHTML, compatible with major web browsers, navigable from mobile phones and indexable by search engines.
Website X5 comes with hundreds of website templates so using the product doesn’t produce a “cookie cutter” website. It’s also possible to produce your own custom template. There is no limit to the number of pages and websites that can be created with the software. Sites created with Website X5 are easy to modify or update because it’s only necessary to export the modified files — the new webpages.
At the moment, Website X5 is available in several European languages. Incomedia plans to release an Arabic version of the software within three months and if the product is successful, they will also be modifying the website templates to accommodate the right to left shift required to produce ideal Arabic websites.
The software already enables more website customization than in any similar budget priced product. Using Website X5, within any website template, the banner can be customized with text, graphics or animation. It is also possible to decide whether the site navigation should be horizontal, vertical or both. The “page grid” which determines the layout of each web page, can be customized per page. While creating the site, any type of user generated content can be included such as text, images, tables, flash animation, video, audio, slide show, image browser, html code and forms.
The biggest downside to the product is that it doesn’t have the provision for including search functionality in the created website, which can be an issue if your website is hundreds of pages in length. And not to confuse anyone, this is referring to “localized search.” Website X5 does an excellent job of allowing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! to index your site so it can be found by others on the World Wide Web.
The bottom line is that Website X5 is great for individuals, groups, schools and small businesses who want to leave a footprint on the Internet. Creating a family website is a wonderful activity for the Eid vacation. So to encourage everyone to do just that and as a gift for the Eid holiday, Arab News has arranged a special discount for its readers with the Incomedia team for the Website X5 Evolution Edition. Access it through www.websitex5.com/promo/arabnews.
