Product Reviews

There are loads of tools to help you make a simple website. Most allow you to design each page by dragging and dropping text and pictures, then exporting them as HTML pages that can be displayed by a browser. At the other end of the scale, professional web-design software such as Adobe's Dreamweaver allows you to design a page, then tweak the HTML code, fine-tuning every element of every page. Namo's WebEditor works the same way as Dreamweaver, but costs over £200 less.

Like Dreamweaver, WebEditor allows you to work in several ways. You can design your pages graphically, edit the HTML code as you would when programming, or view the two simultaneously. This split-screen view is a great learning tool, as it allows you to make edits to your page and see the effect onscreen almost instantly. Tabs along the top of the interface make it easy to switch between these three views and a preview that shows your page as it should display in a browser.

Namo's HTML code view is neat and easy to use. It helps you to type code quickly by automatically

ADVERTISEMENT

generating closing tags such as

The graphical editor isn't perfect, either. It couldn't display all the formatting specified by one of our cascading stylesheets (CSS), so some pages looked radically different to the browser preview. Creating stylesheets is fiddly. A new style editor makes it easy to add styles to the webpage or an external sheet, but it doesn't have the options needed to specify CSS positioning data, and common fonts such as Arial and Helvetica are absent. Unlike Dreamweaver, Namo cannot open a stylesheet for editing in a separate tab so you can work on the page and its styles simultaneously. When we added a positioned DIV to our page manually, the graphical editor didn't display it correctly.

Namo's site wizard is easy to use and produces simple designs suitable for small-business use. The pages it creates don't validate as properly formed HTML, though. Namo has a code checker, but its browser compatibility check doesn't include Firefox or Safari. We found some pages produced by the wizard initially included dead links, but opening and resaving each page fixed this problem.

Namo is not without its faults, but it costs much less than rival products. Its slightly clumsy CSS support won't tempt serious users away from Dreamweaver, but if you're learning web design and you don't have hundreds of pounds to spend, this is a good alternative.