Product Reviews

It's easy to think of a hundred and one cool things you'd love to do with a Web site. Animated menus? Check. Java games? Check. Guestbook and downloadable content? Check. Then reality kicks in. Creating fancy Web pages means learning all sorts of new complicated stuff such as HTML code, Java, ActiveX, Cascading Style Sheets and meta-tags, doesn't it? Not any more. Mindscape's WebCreator 2 aims to make knocking together a good-looking Web page as easy as typing a letter in Word. But is it all it's cracked up to be?

WebCreator is certainly simple to use. The main screen has a navigation panel down the right-hand side, and a fairly minimal set of toolbars along the top. You can put text and images into boxes and drag them anywhere on the screen, which makes layout a piece of cake. And setting up a new site based on one of the program's ready-made 150 templates couldn't be easier. The program keeps unnecessary details tucked away - a great feature for easily confused novice users. Once you've gained a little hands-on

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experience, you may want to create something a bit flashier, or even build a Web site from scratch. At this point you'll find yourself a bit stuck as WebCreator 2 has few of the standard tools that other packages offer for tweaking code and editing your site. It's a real letdown.

There's no way of inserting basic items such as tables and frames, leaving you without an extremely handy way of positioning objects on the page. Neither can it create elements such as check boxes and forms, which allow your site's users to enter data. These are pretty complex elements that first-time users may be able to do without - but they're the sort of thing that most people will want to dabble with sooner or later.

To cap it off, WebCreator has a very unusual way of generating the final Web page code. Rather than creating standard HTML, the pages rely on lots of clever JavaScript. This means that modifying your pages later will be tricky unless you use WebCreator. In other words, you'll find it hard to move on when you've outgrown WebCreator's basic range of tools, and may even need to recreate you Web pages from scratch. We were also unimpressed by the 'Insert counter' feature, which does nothing to explain to novice users what a counter is - or what you'd use it for.

If you simply want to create a Web site as quickly and as easily as possible, then for the asking price WebCreator 2 is a solid, workmanlike piece of software. But the limited range of tools and non-standard code that it generates means that you may outgrow it very quickly. We'd advise spending a little extra on a more orthodox program.