Have you ever struggled to create those cool looking header graphics you see on most professional web sites?

If the answer is 'yes' then your troubles are over.

Intellimon Ltd, publishers of XSitePro, have launched a brand new free piece of software that makes creating header graphics an absolute breeze, even for people who don't know one end of a paintbrush from the other, or shiver at the thought of using a conventional graphic design package.

"We realized some time ago that many webmasters, particularly those producing sites for themselves or for small businesses, had trouble creating attractive header graphics to use on their web sites" says Paul Smithson, the founder of XSitePro. "We wrote XHeader to meet that need, and from the initial feedback it seems we've hit the nail right on the head.”

XHeader comes complete with over 1,000 built in header templates that users can add text, graphics and special effects to.

The software itself is like a cut down version of a standard graphics package, but cleverly takes away the complexity so that users can focus on creating attractive header graphics without having to spend weeks or months learning how to use the software first.

"We did a lot of research before producing the initial specifications for the software and I think that this has resulted in a winning combination of ease of use and a finished graphic that looks like it was created by a professional" says Paul Smithson.

XHeader is available free of charge from http://www.xheader.com

Intellimon's user-friendly course teaches industry-standard site-building, from design to video to RSS feeds

For the past year, the publishers of the XSitePro website design software have been working to perfect a website-building training course geared toward ecommerce start-ups and other organizations and individuals with no professional website-building experience. This comprehensive online course, known as The Complete Guide to Website Building, is now available to the public.

The 30-hour course teaches online learners to build a professional-quality website with all the trimmings such as video, audio and RSS feeds. While the course uses the XSitePro software as the website-building tool, it covers a lot more besides. With 26 modules, the course includes topics such as hosting, graphics, design, site search, search engine optimization (SEO), keywords, social bookmarking, list-building, ecommerce, affiliate programs, PayPal, Google AdSense and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

The Complete Guide to Website Building's instructional format features over-the-shoulder walk-throughs, classroom-style video lessons, homework exercises, interactive illustrations and quizzes. Moreover, participants do not need to track their progress in the course; the system does it for them.

"Many people hope for a big red button they can press to make a site build itself," said Paul Smithson, founder of Intellimon Ltd., the company that publishes XSitePro website design software. "Our new online course is as close to that button as you can get. It's non-threatening, easy-to-follow and eliminates the frustration beginners encounter with so many other website-building tools."

The cost of the course is $197. The fee entitles participants to twelve months of access to the training and it's backed up by a very generous twelve-month money-back guarantee.

"We make it easy for 'non-techies' to develop professional-quality websites quickly and easily. Our training course and site design software give people powerful tools that enable them to develop the type of websites previously limited to highly experienced webmasters and coders," Smithson concluded.

For more information on The Complete Guide to Website Building, visit http://www.complete-guide-to-website-building.com or for the XSitePro software, visit http://www.xsitepro.com.

Intellimon has just released a new software program, XCommentPro, which provides easy-to-use tools for commenting, rating and visitor interaction on websites.

Designed for maximum control and functionality, XCommentPro is compatible with Dreamweaver, FrontPage, ExpressionWeb, XSitePro and all major web-authoring packages. It can also be manually inserted into HTML source code for those who prefer to hand-code their websites.

XCommentPro takes into account the current industry focus on social media, offering RSS feed functionality and social bookmarking. With its social bookmarking links, visitors can promote page content using services such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more. The software can also create automatic "tag clouds" for easy navigation and indexing.

"We wanted to make XCommentPro a turnkey solution for website owners," says Paul Smithson, founder/CEO of Intellimon. "Anyone with a web presence simply cannot ignore the huge part that user-generated content plays on-line today."

According to eMarketer, an industry leader in research and trend analysis on digital marketing and media: "User-generated content is integral to the online experiences of millions of U.S. Internet users. From entertainment to communications to e-commerce, consumers are increasingly in charge of the creation, distribution and consumption of digital content."

Smithson is offering visitors to the XCommentPro site a free report on user-generated content. According to the report, user-generated content is the fastest-growing segment of the Internet: "The nature of the way content is being created on the web is shifting ... to a trend in which consumers are encouraged to guide and direct the conversation."

The report also notes that user-generated content improves a site's "stickiness" - the ability to capture and hold a visitor's attention, and build a strong sense of community. When a site incorporates user-generated content, the report says, people are more likely to stay on the page and to return. A case in point, says Smithson, is YouTube, which relies totally on users for content. YouTube is the web's second largest search engine, only behind Google.

For more information on XCommentPro and for the free 83-page report, visit http://www.xcommentpro.com

(and Twitter's no better, either)...

The results of the world's largest website traffic survey were published today in a freely downloadable report, revealing some startling facts about how effective the different traffic-building techniques are for driving visitors to businesses' websites.

The survey, conducted earlier this year by website software and training company Intellimon, in partnership with the University of Bradford polled over 4000 online businesses.

The objective of the research was to better understand the nature of challenges facing businesses marketing themselves on the Internet.

Undergraduates from the University of Bradford assisted in the design of the research and the analysis of the responses collected.

Speaking about the new report earlier this week, Intellimon CEO Paul Smithson said "With the generous assistance from the University of Bradford we've completed one of the definitive pieces of research into online traffic and Internet marketing in general. I've been in business online for over fifteen years and I certainly wish I'd had access to information like this when I was starting out".

The report not only proves some popular theories when it comes to what 'works and what doesn't', it also uncovers some unexpected trends.

Some of the findings within the report include:

- While 67% of respondents use social media platform Facebook to promote their business, an average of only 29% find the platform effective in any way for driving traffic to their business website.
- Popular micro-blogging platform Twitter faired equally badly, only 27.2% saying they found it effective for generating website traffic to their business website.
- The typical age of people doing business online is higher than you might have thought. Of the thousands of respondents 62% were fifty years of age or older.

Commenting on the report findings Paul Smithson said "We were genuinely shocked by some of the results across several areas; Social Media, Training, Outsourcing and Demographics sections all threw up some very unexpected results. It's a real eye-opener, even for experienced online marketers".

The report findings also established:

• Despite the prominence of older business-people online, it was actually the youngest age-group (18-43 years of age) who reported the highest success-rate with their traffic marketing. 25.6% of respondents in this group reported their success rate as 'good' or 'excellent' compared with a spread of 9.8% to 16.3% across the remaining age-groups.
• Despite 'Search Engine Traffic' being reported as the most important traffic generation tactic, an alarmingly low 62.8% of respondents perform SEO only monthly or less frequently.
• Less than 10% of traffic generation activities are outsourced or delegated, typically falling to a single business owner/operator to carry out the tasks required.
• Refreshingly, across virtually every measure, training was acknowledged as being crucial to the success of an online business, with businesses training regularly and investing significant sums in different training materials.

An in-depth 120 page analysis of the survey is available for download at www.thetrafficsurvey.com.

Talking about the free report, Smithson said "This is an incredibly detailed report, and we're proud to be offering it for free to anyone interested in doing business on-line. For the first time businesses are going to be able to stop guessing about what works, and start making decisions based on proven facts, and the experiences of thousands of other businesses".

The free Traffic Survey Report is being published by Intellimon ahead of the release of its forthcoming training course 'The Complete Guide to Traffic' which leverages the research findings across more than forty-hours of training material that teaches business owners/operators how to master traffic generation to their websites.

More information about the Complete Guide to Traffic course can be found at http://www.completeguidetotraffic.com