Hi Manda,
Another Texan...yee-hah! Welcome to the forums!
I broke your post off and started a new thread since it's sort of a separate topic.
First of all Site Build It! has come a loooong way. When it was first announced back in 2000 I thought it was a little overhyped. That's why I didn't buy until 2005.
Back then you couldn't use Dreamweaver and had to use the block by block builder. A big drawback for people who want to go outside of the standard SBI! templates and do their own design.
Then they finally improved that and now you can use your own software. In fact I recently redesigned my site using Dreamweaver. The brainstorming tool has been simplified and improved tremendously since I bought it.
There is a LOT of reading. And some people get annoyed by that. Everyone wants to dive in there and make money as fast as possible right? But those that skip the reading are usually the ones that email me and ask me what they're doing wrong.
Ken is very wordy with his tutorials but it's important to go through all the reading before you build your site because it's those key points that many people who go through cheap hosts miss. Doing the research and understanding the importance of defining your niche is sooooo important. An that's what SBI! emphasizes before you even start to build your site.
Now your boyfriend may have issues with it since he's in IT. A lot of people with a technical background want to get in there and do all the PHP, MYSQL and all the things you can do with a regular host.
SiteSell is working on allowing you to do many of the same technical things you can do with normal, cheaper hosts but that all takes time. So in other words if you want to create a chat room, message forum like this or run a WordPress blog off your domain (yoursite.com) you couldn't do that.
But I've read that's coming soon.
Someone on another forum made a great analogy. When you are building a website without SBI!, you sort of have to understand what's going on "under the hood" so to speak. But with SBI!, a lot of the "hood happenings" are never seen by you can focus on building your content and getting traffic.
For example, say you wanted to create a contact form on your website. You'd have to know a bit about setting up the form. And if you wanted to add a CAPTCHA image to prevent spammers from using your form to send spam you'd have to learn how to set that up too. SBI! does all that for you. All you do is say "Add Contact Form", tell it what fields you want (Name, Email, etc.) and it's done in seconds.
So you get a lot of the "under the hood" stuff taken care of for you when you'd normally have to learn how to program this yourself. In fact when I had a CAPTCHA image installed on my non SBI! site, I ended up paying someone to set it up. That's just one of the many advantages. You also get a mailing list manager so you can send out mass emails and setup autoresponders.
There's also a forum you'll have access to where you can chat with other SBI! customers. I took advantage of this when I first joined when I had questions, etc. because there is a lot of reading and a lot to absorb at first. But well worth it.
Overall I think SBI! is a great tool and there are others on this forum with SBI! sites who can vouch for that as well. So I'm not the only one on the bandwagon.
Hope that helps!!