easy web design - Industry Trend or Event

Home Office Computing, April, 2001 by Carol S. Holzberg

Software that gets noticed on the Net

IMAGE IS EVERYTHING, ESPECIALly for home-based businesses seeking a presence on the Web. A well-designed Web site should be an extension of your business--it should be easy to find, offer interesting content, and provide a simple way for interested viewers to contact you both online and off.

Web site development is a tricky business. If your objective is to produce great-looking Web pages that attract visitors, you must have a striking design that downloads quickly. You also have to make sure every link works, and that your pages accommodate all popular browsers and platforms. And since the majority of Internet users still lack a fast TI, cable, or DSL connection, you have to remember that the best layout isn't necessarily the one featuring more pictures than an art museum, or one so heavy with multimedia sounds, video clips, and Java applets that it takes forever to load.

You can always leave the details to someone else and outsource your site. This is a great option for businesses that have the money, but for many home-based businesses, do-it-yourself design software will have to do. Thankfully, many off-the-shelf packages produce attractive and effective layouts without draining your company bank account--many of them are even easy to use. We looked at three such packages. In them, we found layout wizards, step-by-step tutorials, site templates, drag-and-drop editing, and plenty of graphics to get us started.

Keep in mind that no matter how friendly your Web design software promises to be, Web site development doesn't end once design is complete--there's also the matter of publishing your site to the Web, then managing your site and its content. Most Web design packages will help you upload your pages to a Web server, modify content, and troubleshoot problems, but you'll have to find a reliable ISP to host your site on your own.

Microsoft FrontPage 10

Still in Beta at the time of this review, FrontPage 10 (price not available at press time; Microsoft Corporation, 800-426-9400, www.microsoft.com) offers a variety of templates, themes, wizards; and, unlike higher-end products, a word processor-style interface that requires no prior knowledge of HTML.

Tightly integrated with applications in the latest version of Microsoft Office, FrontPage has new authoring features that include 67 customizable themes. Users can apply a theme to a single page or to all pages in a site. There's also a customizable Photo Gallery which designers can visit to search for clip art or retrieve personal photos and images.

Enhanced drawing tools such as autoshapes, drop shadows, Word Art, and text boxes helped us create attractive-looking pages without requiring us to write any HTM` code. A Border drop-down tool added colorful borders and background color to text and graphic elements, and an improved Table tool let us create great-looking tables.

Keeping your site engaging is no problem when you use FrontPage--you can pull in content from MSNBC, MSN Search, Expedia, and bCentral business tools automatically. There's also a Database Results Wizard to establish a connection with a specified database and view its contents.

Designers who are familiar with HTML codes and tags can take some control over source code appearance and operation, such as making pages XML-compliant or preserving ASP source code. FrontPage also boasts enhanced site management tools, including Usage Analysis Reports and flexible Web site publishing tools to control the content.

To publish our site, we simply clicked on Publish Web from the File menu. FrontPage has support for FTP file transfer and FrontPage Server Publishing. You can drag either individual tikes or entire Web sites from your desktop to their new destination. A new Background Publishing feature lets you continue working on your Web site as file transfers occur behind the scenes.

FrontPage 10 is a careful balance of geeky code-cruncher and wizard-based starter software, making it a perfect choice for home-based businesses looking to get on the Web.

A Thorough integration with Microsoft Office

B Content features limited to Microsoft info

Namo WebEditor 4.0

WebEditor 4.0 ($99; Namo Interactive Inc., 800-656-5426, www.namo.com) includes a battery of friendly WYSIWYG design tools, such as 120MB of dip art, 200 themes, templates, a GIF Animator, and spelling dictionaries for 12 languages. Support for drag-and-drop editing, a Site Wizard with several page templates, and colorful themes combine to simplify site construction as well.

We found the organization of this package to be very helpful in keeping track of our work--navigation trees are used to display or define the structural relationships of documents in a project. We also enjoyed WebEditor's collection of image-creation and editing tools, which allowed us to create rollover graphics; rotate and flip artwork; and apply special effect gradients, drop shadows, blurs, and text overlays.

Advanced features allowed us to view source code, and WebEditor's Script Manager helped us add, remove, and modify our pages' JavaScript actions. Users can also create cascading style sheets (CSS) and implement dynamic navigation bars. Pages can be enhanced with JavaScript effects, image rollovers, and drop-down menus.