Labs

For novice users, Serif WebPlus's easy controls, simple step-by-step wizards and colourful templates are a quick and painless route to creating fun and attractive Web sites. Sadly for Serif, some of its competitors' newer products create sites that look just as good. Those sites are also easier to use, and will work better on a greater number of PCs.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the detail. For instance, WebPlus creates pages that are of a fixed width. This is fine is your screen is running at a low resolution and the Web page fills the screen. If the page doesn't fill the screen, though, you're left with blank, white space on either side of it in your

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browser window. This doesn't have to be the case. Vcom's new edition of WebEasy also creates fixed-width pages, but it tells the browser to fill the extra space with the same colour as is used on the background to your Web page.

WebPlus also uses image files for lots of complicated bits of formatting. For instance, if you apply fancy effects like glowing borders or drop shadows to text, WebPlus turns that text into a separate image file, called a JPEG. Image files are much larger to download than simple HTML instructions, so this will make your page appear more slowly - particularly for users who don't have broadband. This is a real problem if your format your entire page using a table, and have different background colours for each cell. In this case the background for the entire page will be one large image file. For only £10 more you can get NAMO WebEditor 5.5, which does this job using only HTML code.

WebPlus wins lots of kudos for being simple to use, but it's just not as good as some of its newer rivals at producing pages that will load quickly and be compatible with a wide range of browsers. Perhaps Serif will fix this in the next version, but until then NetObjects Fusion or Namo WebEditor offer better value for money.