Serif WebPlus X7 review

When you create a new page, a helpful properties box lets you set parameters such as filename, a header description and keyword sections to make it search engine friendly and its relationship to the other pages in your site. WebPlus’s HyperLink shortcut makes it easy to link between pages on your site, while all top-level pages are added to an automatically generated navigation bar. You can add more pages beneath the top-level pages. This, and a Site Navigation overview tool, makes it incredibly easy to visualise the structure of your site.

It’s also easy to add images; you simply drag an image box on the page wherever you want the image to appear. Other elements, many of them based around Flash or JavaScript, can easily be added to any page via WebPlus X7’s Insert menu. You can choose from a number of different photo gallery styles, as well as image sliders, video players, social media widgets, forms and mouseover effects.

WebPlus X7 is fairly cheap for a fully featured WYSIWYG web design tool. The page creation and site navigation tools make it simple to build an elegant website from scratch, without having to keep the site’s internal structure in your head.

However, WebPlus X7 is still a distinctly limited program. It’s not suitable for editing or creating templates for CMS-driven web development tools such as WordPress, and the lack of a proper HTML editor is irritating. If you really are code-averse and don’t need much flexibility then WebPlus is great. We managed to assemble the bones of a clean, stylish website quickly with minimum effort. If WebPlus X7 appeals to you, be aware of its limitations and give the trial version a go before you buy.