Product Reviews

Web design programs for home users often create pages using old technologies. This means they may not come out right in all browsers, and rarely look good when printed, or viewed on a mobile phone. Incomedia's WebSite X5 Compact is unusual in that it allows you to create sites that use modern XHTML technology quickly and easily.

WebSite X5 Compact is essentially a step-by-step wizard that builds and uploads a website in five stages. It's not really web design, because there's no way to tweak the finished pages to your taste.

The process is impressively painless. You start by entering some details, such as the site's title, then select a design. With 63 templates and four

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colour options for each, there's plenty of choice. You can customise the banner at the top of each page by adding text or images. Next, you add pages. You can build a simple site, where each page links to all the others, or a bigger site with pages in folders.

To add content to each page, you drag text and image compartments onto the page, which is represented by a grid. You can add or remove rows and columns, but there's no way to customise it by, for instance, expanding one of the images sideways further than other items in that column. This grid approach doesn't leave much room to get creative, but ensures pages will look simple and clear.

It's easy to add slideshows, allowing the user to click through several images in turn, or a page of images. Finally, you can adjust the look of text and menus, then save your site to disk or upload it to your web space (often provided with your broadband account).

Our website uploaded fine, and looked good in all the main browsers. Our checks showed it was created using valid XHTML, which is extremely rare for a page generated by simple software. There were a few small errors in its CSS style sheets, and our pages didn't print well, but they did display surprisingly well on the small screen of a smartphone.