Labs

As its name suggests, the emphasis in VCOM's Web Easy Professional is very much on ease of use. The promise is that you can produce an eye-catching, professional-looking site without ever needing to know what an HTML tag is.

Key to this is Web Easy Professional's use of predefined site templates - and there are more than 120 provided. These templates don't just define a look-and-feel for your site, they define the pages and even the text they contain. Using the Website Assistant, for example, you can choose a template from the Business category, fill in information about your company, its products and services; when you click Finish, the entire site appears.

Creating a site by simply picking a template off-the-shelf is all very well in theory, but out in the real world you're going to need to be able to customise the results. However, this is peculiarly awkward in Web Easy Professional. Double-clicking a text block lets you edit your copy, but any formatting you apply immediately disappears unless you

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first turn it into so-called Rich Text. Even then the control is limited - there's no obvious way to apply bold to a typeface, for example. Even stranger, when we added extra copy it ended up overrunning the text block below, which goes completely against HTML's inherent text-flow nature. Worse, when we previewed the page in a browser we discovered that the text block had been turned into a bitmap; this means it becomes unselectable, invisible to search engines and unnecessarily download-heavy.

Web Easy Professional's layout and text handling are poor but the program is much happier when it comes to graphics. Running across the bottom of the screen is the 'lightbox browser' palette, which displays thumbnails of more than 150 file formats including Flash and animated GIF. You can then just drag and drop these onto your layouts. The program also provides access to more than 30,000 images online with another 30,000 on the CD, and you can draw your own basic boxes, ovals and lines.

Also helping to add to your site's impact is Web Easy Professional's support for DHTML-based scripted effects. These start off with simple but effective image rollovers, move on to unnecessary but eye-catching page transitions and photo-based wipes and fades, before ending with over-the-top and undesirable effects, such as page elements zooming in from all corners.

Overall, there's no doubt that some of Web Easy Professional's pre-made sites are eye-catching and, if you're happy to go with what you're given, you can have a high-impact - though not necessarily efficient - site up-and-running in short order.