Thanks to rcollyer's comments and some of the documentation (which was confusing to a person new to this side of things, i.e. this), I figured this out. On the off chance that anybody stumbles along here and has the same issue, here is what worked for me.

Export["test.xml", 
 XMLObject["Document"][{}, 
  XMLElement[
   "website", {}, {XMLElement[
     "title", {}, {StringReplace[
       ToString[title], {"{" -> "", "}" -> ""}]}], 
    XMLElement[
     "date", {}, {StringReplace[
       ToString[date], {"{" -> "", "}" -> ""}]}], 
    XMLElement["content", {}, {content}]}], {}]]

Thanks to rcollyer's comments and some of the documentation (which was confusing to a person new to this side of things, i.e. this), I figured this out. On the off chance that anybody stumbles along here and has the same issue, here is what worked for me.

Export["test.xml", 
 XMLObject["Document"][{}, 
  XMLElement[
   "website", {}, {XMLElement[
     "title", {}, {StringReplace[
       ToString[title], {"{" -> "", "}" -> ""}]}], 
    XMLElement[
     "date", {}, {StringReplace[
       ToString[date], {"{" -> "", "}" -> ""}]}], 
    XMLElement["content", {}, {content}]}], {}]]

I'll still leave this unanswered in case somebody has a better answer. :)