Labs

Like Mr Site Takeaway Website, Magix Website Maker is a hosting service with an online web-design application built in. Unlike Mr Site, however, it costs only £24 a year for 5GB of online space.

The web-design package is a Flash application that runs in its own browser window. This sounds cool, and certainly the site templates - some of which include animations and sound - look impressive, but the design process is far less straightforward than Mr Site's. The Flash application is also much less responsive than a plain webpage. Often elements became editable only two or three seconds after we had

Not only was the interface confusing and clumsy, but the manual was also woefully inadequate. It didn't even cover fundamental topics such as working with images. Publishing your site is simple, at least. You just choose Publish from Website Maker's file menu and it does the job for you (your domain is actually part of the Magix domain, for instance http://jbloggs1.magix.net/website).

This is a slow, clunky, poorly thought-out way of getting a website. Website Maker would be far better off if Magix ditched the over-complicated Flash-based program and opted for a simple set of menus and templates accessible from its website. If it offered the same service as Mr Site for this price, we'd have been far more impressed. As it stands, the hosting deal is good but if you want to take advantage of it we suggest you bypass Magix Website Maker and use your own web-design program instead.