Product Reviews

Designing a web site can be a pretty straightforward and rewarding thing to do, whether the site is for a business, or just intended as a way of sharing your photo album with distant relatives. The set of formatting codes used to create web pages, known as HTML ('hypertext markup language') is fairly simple to learn, and there's nothing in theory to prevent you from designing an entire web site using little more than Windows Notepad. However, although fairly easy, typing in page after page of HTML can be extremely tedious, and it's easy to make mistakes - which is why you're much better off with a piece of web design software.

In contrast to the likes of HoTMetaL Pro (reviewed March 2000) and Microsoft FrontPage, WebPlus is aimed squarely at people who don't know (or care) about the intricacies of HTML. It makes claims along the lines of "create mind-blowing web pages

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in seconds, without doing anything difficult". But then they all say that, don't they?

WebPlus comes from Serif, who will be familiar to many readers for making budget DTP software, and its interface features the now-common array of tools arranged along both vertical and horizontal toolbars.

Page Wizards enable you to create pages using a step-by-step approach, in which you select a template and then add your own details. The problem is that many of the templates look like they'd be more at home on a piece of paper, and little thought seems to have been given to how they'd appear on the screen. For example, one of the templates, called Computer, features a navigation bar arranged vertically down the page. But when this is displayed in your browser, most of the nav bar disappears off the bottom of the screen, and you have to scroll down to access it, which is just plain bad design. Unfortunately, this flaw is all too common across many of the templates.

There are plenty of extras that may seem attractive, but overall it feels more like a DTP package than a web design tool, to the extent that the pages themselves have a fixed height, which is nonsensical, as web pages can be scrolled for as long as there's information to display.

It's hard to recommend this product, then, and beginners would be much better off with Microsoft's FrontPage. Unfortunately, cheap, easy web design still seems like something of a Holy Grail for now.