Labs

At only 50 quid excluding VAT, VCom's WebEasy Pro is the cheapest software in the group test. It's aimed at people with no experience of Web design, so it makes the process of creating your own site as simple as possible.

WebEasy Professional allows you to design your Web site as if it were a page in a word processor, dragging and dropping pictures, adding text and moving elements around until you're happy. A decent selection of templates is included. These allow you to build a complete site in just a few seconds. Only at the end of the process, when you click 'publish', is your page turned into HTML that can be displayed in a Web browser program. Like Serif, though, WebEasy turns lots of its fancy page formatting into image files. This

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will make the resulting pages slower to download. Also, when there are lots of images on a page, it's more likely that those images will be displayed out of alignment in some browsers, particularly older ones.

On the bright side, though, this program has a number of very useful features. Along with the program itself, you get a large collection of decent clip art pictures and some photos to use with your Web site. To place them on the page, all you need to do is drag and drop them where you want them to be. WebEasy Professional also makes it dead easy to create a simple shop on your Web site. All you need to do is sign up with an Internet shopping facility such as PayPal, which will collect your customers' details for you. You then enter the details of your PayPal account into WebEasy and the software will create a page with everything users need to buy products from you. It's that simple.

Unfortunately, you can't view the HTML code of your Web page at the same time as you work on it. Worse still, you can only preview your work in Internet Explorer, so you can't check to see if your Web site will look good in rival browsers, such as Netscape.

WebEasy Professional is excellent for those who value ease of use above all, but provides very little flexibility for users who want real control over their work.