Product Reviews

Web design ain't what it used to be. These days, editing packages are so easy to use that anyone can create their own pages and put them online. Serif, for one, has been producing easy-to-use software for years - its Web design package, WebPlus, is now up to version 8. The latest version follows in the footsteps of its predecessors by making Web sites as easy to design as leaflets and newsletters, and hiding as many of the technical details as possible. So just what's new about WebPlus 8?

Certainly not the program's main interface. And that's no bad thing. WebPlus 8 follows the tried-and-tested formula of having a main document screen surrounded by various toolbars. Because of WebPlus's graphical approach, most of the tools will be familiar to anyone who's used a graphic package: there are tools for entering text, drawing shapes or freehand lines, plus the more Web-oriented functions such as inserting tables, calendars and animated GIFs. The interface is one of WebPlus's main strengths, as you can have a lot of fun just playing around with the different effects and tools, safe in the knowledge that if you come up with something you like, it'll

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look exactly the same in your browser as it does in WebPlus.

A particularly useful feature that WebPlus 8 borrows from the world of desktop publishing is the concept of 'master pages'. These enable you to create a template, and use this as a basis for all new pages. This is especially useful with Web pages, where you'll often want a single feature - such as a navigation bar - to stay the same for all pages on a site. WebPlus 8 allows you to designmultiple master pages, which will certainly come in handy on larger sites.

Most of the other improvements to this version are graphical effects, such as drop shadows, as well as bevelled or glowing edges. These work well, and you can combine them with existing features, such as text boxes and transparency, to create layouts that are visually more advanced than those of traditional Web pages. But this power also represents WebPlus's only major shortcoming: when you apply an effect to text that can't be reproduced with HTML, the text is converted into an image file before it's displayed on the Web page. That isn't necessarily bad, because the text will appear just as you intended. But it does raise the spectre of incompatibility with some browsers, as well as longer download times (a full-screen image file is much bigger than a page full of text).

To be fair, it's a fairly small objection and is unlikely to affect the majority of visitors to your site. All the same, it would be a good idea if the program told you in advance that applying a certain effect to text will cause it to be converted in this way.

These gripes aside, WebPlus 8 is both easy and fun to use - pretty much ideal if you fancy knocking up a Web site, but have always been put off by the techie details.