XSitePro was released in 2004. The software helped people create websites easily and quickly. It was popular for a while. Sadly, they closed their doors ten years later.
Why?
The head of the company, Paul Smithson, wrote a blog post giving 12 reasons for closing the company. Most of the reasons are some variation on, “Things are different now than they were 10 years ago.”
It actually reminded me of a quote from Charles Dickens.
“The world has gone past me. I don’t blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.” ~ Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
It’s a reminder for business owners to stay current.
I’ve been in business since 1998. Things have sure changed since then! Mobile websites weren’t on anyone’s list of things to do on a website. When I first saw WordPress, I thought, “Hmmm . . . that’s for developers that can’t write code.” Edge and Chrome didn’t exist. IE and Netscape used to be big.
The times they are a-changin’ and business owners need to stay current. We don’t want to be writing a blog post explaining that we’re closing our businesses because things just aren’t how they used to be.
Indeed, I really liked XSitePro’s simplicity, and there were loads of features it had which I just simply never used. I added WP to my blog subdomain, but for ages kept my original XSP pages just as that. Will likely be changing those over sometime this year now that my own bout with a health challenge or two seem to be (TG) behind me.
Cheers,
April Braswell