by Robert Earls
Want to develop your website, but can't afford to outsource? There are several software products on the market aimed at beginners that claim to be able to provide professional looking websites simply, easily and in house. Web Easy 6 claims on its packaging that it can create a "great website in less than an hour with drag-and-drop simplicity" so let's put this to the test. I will try to create website for a fictitious local band, "The Rocking Weasels".
It needs to have a musical theme, possibly allow embedded music and/or video (although I don't expect in this hour to include this) and allow the contact details of the band to be included. For this mock-up I will use freely available pictures of popular bands.
Installation went without a hitch and I was presented with the following screen when running the program for the first time.
I decided to use the assistant, as I am short on time. Clicking of the first icon gives me a list of about 120 templates to use, broken up into various categories. Each template had a tiny thumbnail image of what the website looks like. I would have preferred a much bigger preview as I had very little idea what the template "Music" I chose would look like.
After selecting a place on the hard drive to save the project, I was asked to select the pictures I will be using on the website. It was here I encountered a problem. I browsed to the directory where I had stored the images and clicked on the images in turn to discover which ones I'd like, only to discover that one of the images caused the program to produce an unrecoverable error.
I decided to try again leaving out this particular image. As a side note, I loaded the image into Adobe Photoshop Elements to see if it was corrupted, but it caused no problems. So I selected a number of images and proceeded using the assistant, which further presented me with a confusing screen.
At this point I thought that maybe I should attempt to look at the manual. Unfortunately, the description of creating a website using the assistant seems to leaves out this option. So I decide to leave the text as it is, maybe I can change it later. A few clicks later and I'm presented with a four page website.
It's not exactly right for a rock band, but with a little adjustment here and there it could be OK. Double clicking on the main text area I was able to enter an introduction to the band. I wanted to bold the name of the band, but I could not see any way to entering anything other than plain text.
The heading of the first page "about me" was not right so I wanted to change this to "About The Band" or "The Band". Unfortunately, I could not seem to find any way to change the text in the menus or the background, it appears to be a graphical object. This was a disappointment as it looks like you need to create a images in a graphics program, like Adobe Photoshop Elements, to replace the ones supplied. My goal of creating a great website in less than an hour seems to be lost.
I decided to preview the webpage that Web Easy Professional created, in order to look at the code that is created. I was very happy and very surprised to see that the code generated seemed to be very good. Using my browser, I was able to increase and decrease the size of the text on the page, which is useful for people with impaired sight. However, the menu did not have sensible "alt" tags and they remained the same size.
All four pages were created and accessible via the menus. The last page appeared to be a list of external websites, you would like to link to. I believe this was created using the text entered in the confusing assistant page, mentioned above.
Other features of the software of interest are
Despite the problems I encountered, I was happy with the easy of use of the software and the features it included, like some advanced features I would not have expected from such a package. Maybe creating a website in less than one hour was too much to expect. However, given a couple of days, I'm sure I could have used this software to produce a perfectly good website.
It has its flaws, but Web Easy Professional 6 is a pretty reasonable web design package for the beginner.
Editor: Since the publication of this review, Avanquest Software contacted us to find out more about the problems we experienced with the software. The company have now fixed the problem for the rest of the European issues of this version of the software, which are due for release in September. The fix will also be in all future versions of the software, and the company have created a FAQ for any other people experiencing this problem.
Web Easy Professional 6 is produced by VCOM, part of Avanquest Software. The software is available directly from Avanquest at www.shop.avanquest.com/uk/prod.php?pid=1150 for £49.98, and from other online software retailers including North Wales based Saver Software at www.saversoftware.co.uk/details-209.htm for £44.99.
About the Author
Robert Earls has worked for many years as a Technical Consultant in the IT industry. He now runs a successful online business
www.argentice.co.uk.
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