Product Reviews

Web hosting is so cheap that anyone can afford to have their own site. The only problem is building the pages. WebPlus 10 is designed to make this simple. It sits between incredibly simple editors, such as FrontPage, and Adobe's professional DreamWeaver.

WebPlus 10's predefined controls make it easy for you to add sophisticated content to your website. The idea is that you can simply drag and drop the controls you need on to the page and export the results to your web space.

It's very easy to use, too. Features such as the PhotoGallery let you create a working gallery quickly, complete with captions, drop shadows and thumbnails. You can reposition the results on the page and resize them to fit. Other controls, such as the RSS feed tool, are just as easy to use and let you display feeds from other sites on your front page. The best way to start is to use the website templates bundled with WebPlus, as these give a good idea of how the application works and what you can achieve with it.

There are problems with Serif's approach, though. First, WebPlus doesn't deal well with websites that it didn't create. We tried to import a simple website that used style sheets, but WebPlus doesn't recognise external style sheets and made a mess of the layout.

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It also rescaled the banner picture, distorting it in the process.

The other big problem with WebPlus is that it does its level best to keep you away from the code. While you can force a code view, it's difficult to follow and hard to edit. DreamWeaver's simple split-screen view is much easier to follow, as it lets you see how the code matches up with the finished page. Instead, WebPlus creates projects in a proprietary format and generates the HTML pages only when you export your site to your web space.

Some of the tools, such as the blogging object, are not much use either. This is one of Serif's online Smart Objects (you have to register to access them) and creates a simple blog on your page. It's almost too simplistic, though, and you can only post new messages using the WebPlus 10 Manage Object dialog box, which isn't much use if you're away from home. There's also no means of navigating through the blog, such as a simple calendar to click. If you want your own blog, try a dedicated blog, such as WordPress (www.wordpress.com) or Blogger (www.blogger.com).

That said, WebPlus has some nice touches. The impressive range of animation, navigation and dynamic tools makes it easy to create beautiful pages that pull information from other sites. If you plan to create just a few attractive pages, WebPlus does the job well. As soon as you learn more about website design, though, WebPlus becomes frustrating to use.

If you want more from your site we'd suggest learning CSS - it's not very hard and there are plenty of good tutorials online. If you want to create dynamic database-driven sites, Microsoft's free Visual Web Developer 2005 Express is worth mastering. DreamWeaver remains the best choice for professionals, though.