WEB! 2.0 review

WEB!

from NTM Publishing aims to provide a cheap and cheerful route into the joys of web design. You're greeted with a plain interface with a sparsely populated toolbar. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can be intimidating to be presented with a blank screen when you first start up the program, and something more like Serif WebPlus's approach, where you get a screen that lets you create a new page from scratch or use a wizard, is a little more welcoming.

WEB! doesn't suffer from bad templates, because it doesn't have any in the first place. This is quite an omission in a product aimed at the novice, since most of us aren't graphic designers and we need all the help we can get. What WEB! does offer is a set of tools for inserting and manipulating elements on-screen, as well as a set of rather nifty special effects that can be applied to those elements. To add some text, for example, you click a button which brings up a box into which you type the text. You can specify properties like the font and text colour from here, as well as more fancy extras like scrolling 'marquee' text, and sounds to play. The text then appears in a moveable box, rather as you'd expect in a desktop publishing program. Pictures and links are also treated as moveable objects, and all objects exist in layers, which means that when two objects overlap you can decide which is in front. However, WEB!'s method of entering text is not ideal for web page design, as often you'll want to see exactly what the text will look like on the page. Because it forces you to enter text in a separate screen before it appears on the page, you lose some control over the layout.

There's very little positive to say about this product, as it offers the bare minimum of features. Adding and positioning objects works fine, but the text editing is extremely basic, and the lack of templates means that you get very little help. One of the few 'extras' on offer, the special effects, are simply done using features built into the latest versions of Internet Explorer, and can be added to any web page by anyone with a little bit of HTML knowledge.