Product Reviews

Ready Built Web Sites On A Disc is designed to make building your own Web site as easy as one, two, three. It isn't a professional product, nor are the results anything you would want to use for a business. But with its emphasis on ease of use, this disc could help even a non-techie consumer with no interest in HTML to use their recently purchased iMac to create their own home page in an afternoon, as long as they don't have too much to say. And, provided they don't mind the resulting design resembling a hobbyist home page from around three years ago.

When you insert the CD, you're met with an Internet Explorer 4.0 document called GettingStarted. The instructions are very simple to follow, and the developers are to be heartily congratulated for that. However, it's very easy to understand because you're essentially creating very little and have little choice in what you produce.

In the first stage, the program asks you to choose between either a three-button or five-button frameset design, and templates for a three-page (nine picture) and five-page (15 picture) Web site respectively. Next, you have to decide whether or not you want your frame to have a top bar.

With these momentous decisions out of the way, you're presented with around a dozen ugly designs which correspond to your preferences. Make your selection and you're instructed to copy a named folder from the CD to your Mac's hard disk.

In this folder you'll find a collection of HTML pages (originally created in GoLive CyberStudio

You're then instructed to create a series of nine (or 15) JPEG format images of exactly 210 x 158 pixels, which you copy and paste on top of the blank pictures in the folder. Here, the program's tightly controlled instructions get a little more vague because no graphics program is supplied on the disk. Instead, you're advised to use some graphics software such as that which is typically supplied with most scanners, digital cameras, and so on.

You're also expected to use whatever graphics program you may have sitting around on your hard disk to add text menus to the button menu graphics which your choice of site has selected. Using Photoshop 5.0 to do this is a doddle. But adding a text layer to a JPEG graphic with some scanner or digital camera capture software wouldn't be so easy.

Next, using Netscape Composer (a horrible HTML editor), or even just SimpleText, you're instructed on how to replace text like 'This is your Headline' with your own desired message.

The purpose of these rather cumbersome cut-and-paste exercises is to make sure that by using exactly the page names and picture names supplied in the template, you'll avoid having any direct contact with HTML and can be reasonably sure that your site will work.

Finally, you're advised to contact your ISP for information on how to upload your Web page and take advantage of your free server space to create another home page.

Strictly speaking, you can actually make a very simple Web site in an afternoon with this disc, but all you're getting for your £30 is a short series of instructions, and some very crude HTML page designs. There's no graphics or HTML software enclosed and the free clip art is awful.

Even a relative novice could achieve the same results for very little extra effort using Netscape Composer, which is part of the Communicator suite. At least this would teach them a few of the basics in Web-page design, enabling them to ultimately enjoy more flexibility in how their page turns out.