DreamSite Review

Dreamlevels is a Ukraine-based company that creates a number of small software products at very affordable rates. This review will focus on its SEO CMS called Dreamsite.

Highlights

Dreamsite is an extremely easy-to-use content management system (CMS). The software is so simple that anyone could figure out how to add a page in 1-2 minutes. The software comes with a basic template that you can edit in an HTML editor like Dreamweaver and upload by FTP. It takes a little playing with it to make sure you upload to the correct folder but that’s really minor.

The system lets you create 2 main menu systems and you can customize the link text in each which is great for SEO. Also, there are easy-to-use meta-tag form fields which clearly show that SEO was considered to some extent when they created the software.

You can name pages exactly what you want them to be, including hyphens (e.g., www.yourwebsite.com/about-our-company).

Dreamsite allows you to create many different templates on a page-by-page basis so you can choose which one you want to use for A/B testing purposes while you try to maximize your return on investment (for example, using pay per click).

One very interesting feature is that you can publish complete static pages from the dynamic back-end.This was built into the software and by fluke has helped this product from SEO perspective. The reason is that Google has recently announced that the speed of websites is a factor in their algorthm and so having a static page can be better than a CMS-generated webpage in some cases.

Limitations

The software does have a few limitations that are noteworthy. First, if you want to add a link to your homepage in the menu navigation, it must always go to www.yourwebsite.com/index.htm and cannot go to www.yourwebsite.com. That is something you want to avoid from an SEO perspective.

The expandability of this software is very limited. Page management for a 10-20 page website is good but beyond that, it will become time-consuming to figure out where pages are in the back-end. Since the software is so simple, it is difficult or impossible to make many SEO-related upgrades (or even make a “fancy” website). We purchased several licenses and one site we built required a lot of items such as PHP-includes which didn’t work well with this software so a lot of custom programming was required.

The WYSIWYG is somewhat limited and it can become difficult to judge what something will look like when you actually publish it. That said, there is a preview feature that works fairly well.

There are no native features like adding XML feeds, Google Analytics or other SEO-related items of that nature.

Next, once you buy your license to use Dreamsite, you must send the FTP info to the company who then installs the files on the server. They are quick about it but you can’t talk to anyone in the company if anything goes wrong. You can only get email support.

Overall

Dreamsite is a good starter CMS. It has very basic functionality with some key SEO aspects. For more advanced projects, you will probably want a system that is more expandable and robust.