Lab

Web Design Software

Andy Warhol once said that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Well, the future is here. And all you need to be famous, or at least to reach into the lives of thousands - maybe millions - is your own Web site. The thing is, you don't want to intrude into the lives of countless other people merely to make them aware that you have no taste. And that's exactly what they'll think if your Web site looks cheap, tacky and poorly designed.

To avoid the pitfalls of poor Internet design, what you need is a good piece of Web design software. One that's precise and flexible, but still gives enough help and guidance to get you started. You don't want something so complicated that you need a degree in graphic design to use it. That's where Computer Buyer comes in. We tested five Web design programs aimed at non-professionals to find out which can help you make the best sites with the least fuss.

What Does Web Design Software Do?

You might imagine that a Web page is just a big picture that you download. In fact, most of what you see when your on the Net consists of a series of text instructions to your browser, written in a code called HyperText Markup Language - HTML for short. This code tells your browser things like "Here's some text, display it in the font Futura and make it ten points large". Of course, most Web pages also contain images that you have to download, but the HTML in the page still has to tell the browser where to put these pictures on the page, and so on. Making Web sites this way is much more efficient. If you were to create a Web page as an image file, that file would be huge, and would therefore take much longer to download. It would also be much more difficult to make any changes to your Web site once it had been designed.

The thing is, learning HTML is like learning another language. Up until a few years ago the only way to create a Web page was to learn how to read and write HTML, and to then type in the code for each page by hand - a complicated, time-consuming process. For this reason, only professionals and a handful of enthusiasts could create Web sites.

These days, creating Web pages is much easier. If you don't want to, you needn't learn any HTML. Modern Web design software allows you to make a Web page in the same way you would create a document in Microsoft Word, leaving your software to compose the code behind the scenes. These programs are often referred to as 'WYSIWYG' editors. This simply means that when you use them 'What You See Is What You Get'. All the programs we tested work like this.

Recent versions of word processors can also create simple HTML in this way. But even if you have a word processor, there are plenty of reasons to buy a Web design program as well. Word processors can create simple pages containing text and pictures, but there's no way they can make creatively designed pages with elegant layouts and fancy effects. This means that Web sites built using a word processor tend to look amateurish - not the impression you want to make.

Specialised packages like the ones we tested can do things like use frames and tables. A frameset splits a page into sub-pages, each of which acts independently of the others. For example, you might want a single left-hand border frame for your whole site, with links on it to all the different content frames. Each time you press on a link in that border, the right-hand frame would change, but the border itself, which contains all the links, would remain the same. You can do a similar job with tables. These divide your page into separate boxes, into each of which you can place an element of your design, an image, text or links for instance. Some boxes, such as those containing the internal links for your Web site, you may want to remain the same on every page of your site. Others will be different for each page. The important thing is that the table, which is usually invisible to your site's users, allows you to impose a structure on each page and retain precise control over all the elements on that page. Word processors and even some older Web design packages won't do this for you. You can do it in HTML, but it's hellishly complicated, and will take forever to learn.

Another neat feature of modern Web design programs is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Good Web design software lets you create one of these style guides, which define all the formatting, for example, the fonts and point sizes for all your headings and subheadings for a Web site. This is a very useful labour-saving function that helps you create consistent designs.

What Should

I Look For?

A good Web design program should provide reliable results: what you design on screen should be what the visitors will see. Pages should look correct when viewed in all the main browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Netscape. You should also be able to preview your site in your browser while designing.

A Web design program for home and small business users should be easy to use and simple to learn. It shouldn't require any knowledge of HTML or Web jargon - anyone who can make a leaflet in Word should be able to quickly and simply create a Web site. Help files should be available in case you come across any difficulties, and there should be plenty of wizards and templates to help you get your first site up and running as quickly as possible. The software should also give you the scope to grow, as you learn more about Web design. At first you'll need templates and step-by-step wizards to help you, but when you're more experienced you'll probably want to start with a blank page and develop your own ideas. Good Web design software shouldn't get in your way when you do this. The software should still help more experienced users to accomplish difficult tasks like designing Cascading Style Sheets and tables.

Some Web design programs include extra features, such as tools for creating graphics for your site. These are only really worth having if they're a serious alternative to a dedicated graphics program, or if they provide tools specifically for creating Web graphics, like buttons. More importantly, the software should be able to help you publish your Web site on the Internet when it's ready. Uploading files to the Internet can be complicated. The program should make this job as simple as possible. Once you've told it the address of the Web space your Internet service provider (ISP) has given you, as well as your user name and password, the software should guide you through the rest.

Finally, you should be able to edit the HTML code that lies behind your pages as you work, and see what effect this has on your Web site. When you start out making your own Web pages, you'll want the software to create all the code for you. Once you've learnt a bit about Web design, working with HTML code directly will give you greater control over your work when you need it.