Severely flawed web site promotion utility
With the millions of web pages out there, getting yours to appear in even the top 150 results of a search is a challenge. Keywords, phrases, and more must adorn your site description and since virtually every search engine asks for something different, this can be a rather daunting task. In the ongoing quest of site promotion, Softworks USA, Inc. has created www.SitePromoter, a program that, for $129, they promise will get your site in the top 150 search results.
www.SitePromoter was clearly designed for the PC using a stand alone Microsoft FoxPro database. This, in turn, yields hundreds of incomprehensible, 8-lettered, caps-locked, suffixed files. Ignoring that intimidating experience, the program fails to be able to locate its own files half the time.
www.SitePromoter works by having the user input several different pieces of information regarding their site. This includes everything from dozens of key words and phrases, to the server's geographical location. Once this time consuming task is completed, www.SitePromoter will generate a handful of HTML documents and emails that are ready to be sent or uploaded to the 150 or so search engines that it has on file (90% of which you've probably never even heard of). You also need to upload a handful of these HTML files to your server for reference purposes.
After spending almost an hour intricately inputting every bit of requested information for Macinsoft, I was left feeling highly frustrated. On numerous occasions I was asked to limit my information to 100 characters, 60 words, and so on. However, the Word Count part of the program wouldn't function because www.SitePromter couldn't locate one of its files necessary to perform the task.
Counting all the words and characters was extremely annoying, but not nearly as much as when I went to finally prepare all of that information for the web. 20 errors later while it was trying to create the HTML files, I had reached a looping error which couldn't be stopped except by force quitting. Fortunately, www.SitePromoter saves your information on the fly, but it didn't matter since after numerous other attempts the program was still confused and couldn't find its own files.
The awkward database that www.SitePromoter uses is slow and cumbersome, even on a loaded 604/150. The database uses the standard buttons which consist of New, Delete, Next, Back, Beginning, End, and so on. What the program fails to tell you quite a few times is that when you're inputting more than one piece of data, say a few key words, that (in the spirit of a database) you must hit New, not Next, which would seem more logical to the average user. Consequently, hitting Next promptly erases your previous entry.
Getting your site in the top 150 results is a rather vague statement. If your site features tips on cooking zucchini in Japan, it's not a difficult task to get your site near the top if someone searches for "zucchini + Japan". But if the person searches for simply "Japan", does that mean that your site will appear in the top 150 of that search as well? If you're the creator of one of the thousands of pornographic web sites out there, getting yours in the top 150 is a different story. But wait, top 150 of what? Because I used "Macintosh" as one of the keywords for Macinsoft, would typing "Macintosh" put my site amongst the top 150 out of the thousands that exist? It's doubtful, and the figure 150 was most likely randomly picked out of the air. What if everybody used www.SitePromoter, then what would happen?
www.SitePromoter is definitely an excellent idea for legitimate sites wishing to generate more traffic, but its clear that little thought went into the Macintosh version and the program as a whole is buggy, cumbersome, expensive, and simply doesn't work.
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 SRP: $129.99 |