Product Reviews

If you want to create your own website, but come out in a cold sweat at the very mention of HTML, you'll need some web-design software to help you along the way. This type of application isn't new and you would have expected that developers to have used the past decade to iron out any problems and fine-tune their wares. Unfortunately, as Namo's WebEditor 2006 Suite demonstrates, this really isn't the case. Indeed, this latest edition of WebEditor highlights as much of what's wrong within the world of web-design software, as it does what's right.

It's easy to fault WebEditor from the off and its schizophrenic Site Wizard tool provides ample opportunity for criticism. We say schizophrenic, because whether it sets up and saves the files for a website template, or creates and opens for editing said template seems to be decided at random.

It's possible to go through the entire wizard, thoughtfully selecting themes, adding common labels, entering FTP-upload settings and so forth, and at the end of it see nothing displayed in the WebEditor window. On other occasions, the template will inexplicably open into a Site Manager window. If the wizard-generated template is not automatically opened for editing, it can be found under the Recent Files entry on the File menu, as though it had actually been opened previously. This kind of inconsistency would confound web-novices and frankly didn't do a whole lot for our sanity either.

Tabbed design window

However, once that little bump is behind you things do get better. WebEditor employs

ADVERTISEMENT

a tabbed design window that is pretty much par for the course in web-design software. This makes it straightforward to quickly flip between the design screen, the HTML-editing page and preview mode.

Unless you're an HTML whiz, then much of your time spent using WebEditor will be in the design area (the Edit tab), where page elements - graphical buttons and banners, text boxes, menu bars and so on - can be dragged and dropped around easily. Of course, there's a smattering of ready-made clipart, textured backgrounds, line breaks and symbols, but many of these look decidedly dated and it sometimes feels like web design of five years ago.

Better implemented are scripts, via the Scripts Wizard. This allows the easy creation of fancier page elements, like drop-down menus, information-gathering forms, mouse-rollover effects (where buttons light up when the mouse pointer moves over them) and plenty more besides. It's a real shame that WebEditor's other Wizards aren't as accomplished as this one.

Database driven sites

For web-developing nuts, WebEditor can be used to create database-driven websites too, such as a PHP-scripted affair based on MySQL. However, this is seriously meaty stuff and frankly, if you know anything at all about such features, then you don't need us to tell you which web-design software to buy. Conversely, if you don't know much about such things, then WebEditor really isn't the application to help you learn - the manual, help files and Wizards are littered with far too much technical talk to be anything even approaching accessible to novices.

When the time comes to get a finished website up and running on the internet, WebEditor fires up the Publishing window. It's just as well that this isn't labelled as a 'Wizard' because it's nothing of the sort. In fact, it's one of the least helpful uploading tools we've come across in recent times, with the 'Publish Entire Site' option only becoming available if the user manually selects the website's entire folder structure and file collection. Fine if you know to do that - not to mention know how to do that - but needlessly unhelpful either way.