Labs

Serif's WebPlus X2 looks like a good deal. For just £60 you can not only design and publish your website, but also embed podcasts, RSS feeds, photoblogs and even a convincing online shop. It's not the features that let this program down, though; it's the basic design.

For a start, the interface is far too cluttered. Even an experienced designer will have difficulty getting to grips with the proliferation of menus, tabs and buttons on the screen. Some of the best features, such as the ability to add a podcast or RSS feed, look as if they're going to be simple and then turn out to be anything but. A wizard-based approach to these tasks would have

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been far better.

The program also suffers from some peculiar quirks. We imported a site that uses tables to help position certain elements on the page. When we exported the site from Serif's native format to HTML, the program had broken our tables into CSS positioning elements. In itself, this is fine: CSS positioning is a leaner way to lay out your page. At the same time, however, WebPlus had also changed the colour of some of our text, and we had to hunt through the CSS information to find the code that specified the incorrect colour. Strangely, although it imported all the page names correctly, WebPlus went on to rename the files when it exported them to HTML. We were also a little dismayed to discover that you can't flip between HTML and design views. In fact, you can't see the code at all unless you specifically create an HTML page (as opposed to making pages in WebPlus's own format), and then you can't view them in the WYSIWYG environment.

Serif WebPlus isn't a bad program. It's just too cluttered and too much like a DTP program that's been adapted to output to HTML. Serif would have been far better off sticking with its usual formula of offering a good budget program that competes with market leaders feature for feature.