Mr Site Takeaway Website Beginner review

Takeaway Website Beginner provides everything you need to get a website online for a year, including your own domain name.

A password activates your account on Mr Site's website. From here you can choose your domain name, with endings including .com, .co.uk, .org, .net and .me.uk.

You then create your website using the online wizard. There are more than 100 templates, which you can customise to your liking. However, the templates all look very similar and none is stunning. Customisation is limited: you can choose the background colour of your pages and the location of the side bar and navigation menus, but that's about it.

Page titles and the main content of your site is entered in text boxes, but you'll need to switch from Simple to Creative mode to change the fonts and embed things such as YouTube videos. You can create a blog and forum, insert photo galleries, add a music player and even a PayPal shopping cart with ease. There's even an advanced mode that lets you insert HTML, although beginners are unlikely to use this.

The set of features on offer is essentially the same as those of Takeaway Website Standard, but there are a few differences. With Beginner you're allowed just five web pages rather than 50, five email addresses instead of 20, and only 75MB of web space - half the Standard version's allocation - to store your site. However, you still get a respectable 2GB of monthly bandwidth.

Adding photo galleries may be relatively easy (although not half as easy as uploading albums to Flickr), but the resulting slideshow isn't very attractive. The same can be said for many of the widgets and gadgets. What's more, you can't see entire page previews before you publish your site - you can only preview the main content window.

Takeaway Website Beginner is a good buy for someone who wants a very basic website and isn't too bothered by how it looks. It allows FTP access, so if you wanted a better-looking website you could create one in a different application, such as Namo WebEditor 2006 Suite from www.namo.com. Whether you're prepared to do this or not, Takeaway Website Beginner is a cheap way to get a .com site on the web, as the price works out at just £1.67 per month.