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][1]), 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. :)

  [1]: http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/XMLObject.html