www.SitePromoter

Tell the world about your Web site with www.SitePromoter

Your company just established a Web page. Now you must promote your site so that people looking for the products and services your company offers will visit your Web page. But with dozens of search engines on the Internet, the registration process can take days--and even then, your site might not appear in the search engine. Power Solutions for Business offers www.SitePromoter to help you manage this registration process.

The product is a data management tool that registers your Web site on more than 150 Web-based search engines and Internet directories. In addition, Power Solutions for Business regularly updates its database of registration sites, so you can download updates and perform registrations without searching the Web for new places to register your site.

Using www.SitePromoter is straightforward. The opening screen lets you select an existing campaign or create a new one. A campaign is a collection of information about a Web site you want to promote on the Internet.

After you choose to create a campaign, www.SitePromoter presents seven index tabs: Owner, Keywords, Site Title, Categories, Market, Passwords, and Details. Each tab contains fields in which you enter information about your site. For example, the Owner tab contains information about your site name, contact person's name and title, and the home page URL.

Several tabs contain command buttons that launch additional windows in which you input lists of data. For example, when you click the Keywords tab, you see three command buttons: Keywords, Key Phrase, and Descriptions. If you select Keywords, another window appears in which you enter your keyword and press Enter to save it. Press Enter a second time to add a new keyword and repeat the process. You use the arrow buttons to scroll through the list of keywords. List Keywords didn't work when I tested the product. The button yielded a No Keywords error, despite my having a half-dozen keywords sorted for publication.

When you've entered your data in the remaining tabs, you're ready to publish your data. To start this process, click the Details tab, in which you specify any miscellaneous notes, and then click Proceed to site registration. This button lets you create an HTML output file, which you access using a Web browser to complete the registration process.

I opened the HTML output file using Internet Explorer (IE), which yielded the three-frame display Screen 1 shows. The top frame contains a list of Web search engines and command links that let you register your site. The bottom two frames contain information about the search engine and its registration process. To submit your information to a search engine, click Submit.

I was disappointed with www.SitePromoter's registration process. I felt the process should be more automated. I spent more than 3 hours registering my site with all of the search engines on the list. Furthermore, several links to search engines were outdated, and other links brought me to a registration screen in which only a portion of the information I had entered into www.SitePromoter's database had transferred to the search engine. For example, www.SitePromoter did not transfer my email address to the appropriate field in many of the search engines. I needed to manually review each submission and supply missing information, which made registration slow and tedious.

Overall, I found www.SitePromoter's appearance and performance lackluster, and I couldn't get enthusiastic about the software. The registration process was time-consuming, and the software didn't track which sites I submitted my data to. The software has a submission log feature, but you must enter data manually.

Despite www.SitePromoter's shortcomings, the software is still useful. Having a centralized location from which you can submit your Web page's data is helpful and will save you countless hours compared with doing it manually. The software's reasonable price is worth the time and aggravation you'll save.