Product Reviews

Mr Site's Takeaway Website Pro is similar to the web-hosting packages we reviewed in last month's Software Labs. The difference is that you pay £99 upfront for a year's subscription. This works out at a relatively expensive £8.25 per month, but you do get to choose a .com domain and the price includes unlimited bandwidth, so you won't have to pay extra or face your site being shut down if a high number of visitors use up your monthly quota.

We reviewed the original Mr Site a year ago (What's New, Shopper 230) and were impressed by how simple it made the process of registering and designing a website. This new version is aimed at small businesses that don't currently have a web presence, or already have an eBay shop and want to expand and sell products from their own site.

Mr Site's shop facilities are PayPal-based, just like eBay, so you'll need a PayPal account to sell items. Customers can pay using a credit or debit card and don't need to sign up to PayPal. The shop allows you to add items quickly, with multiple images, and will take care of stock control and shipping charges.

Compared to the standard Takeaway Website, the Pro version has 600MB of web space rather than 150MB, 50 email addresses instead of 20 and a maximum of 99 pages as opposed to 50. However, these figures are nothing to shout about when compared to certain web-hosting

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packages. For example, eUKhost's Gold (reviewed in Labs, Shopper 242), costs £4.60 per month and includes 5GB of space, unlimited email accounts and also an unlimited number of subdomains, which can be considered as separate websites. With Mr Site, you can make only one website.

There are other features that make Website Pro's price worth it, including a facility to boost your site's prominence on search engines such as Google. This ensures that pages are correctly categorised; you simply need to enter primary and secondary categories for each page. You can automatically upload your site map to Google, too, and this also helps to push it up the rankings. Some companies charge hundreds of pounds for this search engine optimisation.

Site creation and administration is done via the Mr Site Control Panel (at www.mrsite.com). Here you can add new pages, enter content, personalise the way it looks and even view statistics, such as how many visitors you've had and when they visited.

You can even create your own business cards and letterheads and add extra features such as blogs, photo or video galleries, user polls and mailing lists. While Mr Site won't put any adverts on your site, you can use Google AdSense to let companies place relevant adverts on your pages. You might even make back the monthly fee this way.

Most of the preset site templates are uninspiring and you can't change the basic layout. Overall, though, it couldn't be easier to create a clean-looking website from scratch.

Takeaway Website Pro is great value if you're looking to give your small business a big online presence. It's easy to use and includes everything you need to get a professional-looking site up and running. If you don't plan to sell anything and you don't need to boost your Google rankings, you should opt for the standard version, which costs just £35 for the first year.