Product Reviews

Another day, another takeaway website program. Hot on the heels of Mr Site Pro (search for 198138) comes this effort from Magix, with the boast: 'Impressive web pages are not always created by professional web designers.' We appreciate the sentiment, but it sounds like the rough equivalent of 'Successful open heart operations are not always carried out by qualified surgeons...'

Anyway, setup proved painless, if surprisingly lengthy. Unlike Mr Site, Website Maker installs software on your own PC, although it's largely there to load relevant pages into your web browser of choice. Once you're online, the Website Control Center provides access to various services, the most important of which is Website Maker. This is where you start building your website, either from scratch or using one of a number of templates. You add, remove and/or edit default pages and content and insert shapes, text, objects, images and music.

In use, Website Maker felt a bit clunky and awkward, although it did have a glossy sheen that looked good at first glance. Adding new objects was relatively painless, but the animated interface often wasn't responsive enough, particularly when we wanted to edit parameters. Being Flash-based, Website Maker didn't feel entirely robust and soon had Internet Explorer grinding to a halt.

We weren't terribly impressed with the final output, either. The manual's boasts about this release's improvements to animations

ADVERTISEMENT

and display functions made us wonder what version 1 was like, seeing as the animations in the templates we tried looked dated and shoddy. More importantly, the layouts are over-designed and too specific, making them unsuitable for most people's needs. Although an entirely empty template is provided, that will be too daunting for most users who'd choose this kind of product, and we really think some simpler, smarter templates should have been included.

Another thing that's missing is domain name registration. By default, your website is placed online at yourname.magix.net/website/. If you want your own domain (yourname.com), that'll come in at an extra £1.29 per month, or £1.49 with an email address, which sounds cheap until youtot it up and realise that's twice the price many domain resellers charge. You also need to be aware that, like its contemporaries, Website Maker 2.0 is a one-year purchase: after the first 12 months, there's a monthly fee for keeping your site online.

Getting it out there

More use uncovered further niggles rather than hidden qualities. The 'export' function looked interesting until we realised it merely spits out code for linking to the Flash website that you create on the Magix server, rather than exporting your actual website in a format you could tweak and repurpose using other tools. The new search engine optimisation (SEO) feature also falls down pretty flat. It lets you add keywords and descriptions in meta tags, but these are rarely used any more by search engines, and it's unclear whether Web Maker does anything further to help get your site properly indexed.

To be fair to Magix, Website Maker 2.0 isn't awful; it's just that we're getting increasingly weary of seeing applications that try to sell a basic online service as a sort of everyman's version of proper web design software. The likes of Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and WordPress make it easy to set up a website with quite advanced features, and competing seriously with those well established offerings will take more than a Flash-based site building tool that spits out mediocre content.