Hi GK,
When ever I go on about XSP, it sounds like I should be on the payroll
I started using it about 12 months ago when I was just pulling out my hair trying to get my head around using programs like Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive.
The sales letter sounds really convincing and I loved the fact it came with a 365 day guarantee - gave me more confidence in the product....
So anyway, I bought it and set to work on learning how to use it. The first thing you are advised to do is go through the step by step guide to creating your own site with a tutorial. If takes a few hours - but if you skip this part it will take much longer to learn. The training material has come on a long way since 12 months ago.. There are now a series of tutorial videos which make it so much easier to learn the basics and the advanced features in XSP (I was lucky enough to be one of the few to review the videos in the creation stage before they went live to all buyers)
I could honestly set up a website in about an hour now,including purchasing the domain name. Once you get to grips with what the software can do, it's pretty amazing, I believe a new release is due later this year with even more features!
Setting up the website it the easy bit. The part that takes time is getting all your content together, ready to include it into your website. There is also the keyword research, link building and any other off the page optimization that you can think of.
If you want to create a load of article pages - all you need to do is have all your articles in a folder on your computer and using one of the features, you can import all the articles into a ready made template, which will include having your adsense placed in the articles as well. This will create all your page names for you and add tokens as well.
It has over 100 templates included but these are customizable as well or just learn to create your own using Photoshop.
Once you have your pages created, there is a great feature that goes over your page and gives feed back on what you need to do for best optimisation. This includes telling you how many times your keyword appears in the page and how many words, whether your alt tags are labelled correctly etc.
I personally can't fault the software - as you can see from my doggy site.. with a little bit of playing around.. I've incorporated data feeds, affiliate links to amazon, adsense, RSS feeds, links using a script called AutoLinkster (I was also asked to test this before it's release and it's great for getting links using LinkMetro - can even be incorporated into blogs as it is php)
XSP has been used to create many types of sites now, from full blown affiliate sites, personal sales sites, sales letters and hobby sites.
The key to making it successful is making sure the keyword research is done properly first.
GK - I can't fault this software and although it doesn't have some of the really advanced features that you will find in Dreamweaver, it doesn't have the same kind of price tag as DW but still gets results with a little work done in the preperation part of creating the site.
I hope this gave you some insite into what I think of it but if you want to know anything specific, feel free to message me and I'll try and help... what I would suggest though is checking out their forum. I contributed a lot to that forum and it certainly contains most of the answers now (I'd like to think this will become like that for blogging with WordPress
)