Spin a dazzling page - review of seven Web authoring applications - includes related article on presentation programs and HTML - Build Your Own Web Site - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, June, 1997 by Hailey Lynne McKeefry

Product List:
FrontPage 97
Home Page 2.0
HotDog Professional 3.0
HotMetal Pro 3.0
PageMill 2.0
Spider 1.2
WebAuthor 2.5

HotDog Professional may be more than the average user will need, but at $99.95 list, you get a lot of high-end features for your money.

HotMetal Pro 3.0

RATING: ***

WIN | MAC

The casual user may very well be a little hesitant when first launching the Macintosh version of HotMetal Pro 3.0. The screen is filled with tear-away toolbars (labeled Standard Functions, Forms, Common HTML, and Other HTML), and the page has icons, which graphically represent HTML code. Fortunately, you need only display the toolbar or bars you're actively using; the various tags can be hidden from view with a single command.

The program is made easier to use by its dozens of templates, which are grouped in Company, Personal, and Intranet Web categories. You can also import files in Word, WordPerfect, Word Pro, RTF, and ASCII text formats. Although the program doesn't offer a browser preview mode, you can assign up to four browsers to the Forms toolbar. Then you can launch any browser for quick inspection. This approach quickly ensures that your page will look good in a variety of browsers.

Inserting images is easy: Either use the Insert Image command or drag and drop the file directly into HotMetal Pro. The program also allows you to drag HTML files from a directory to automatically create a link. Some other formatting is a bit more complicated. We sometimes found it difficult to figure out how to get text to look the way we planned. In this instance, WYSIWYG editing would have been a real blessing.

When we finished our files, we used the Validate function to make sure the pages were coded correctly. This provides a list of Extensions not supported in HTML 3.0. Users can also choose to activate the Rules Checking feature, so that the program won't allow invalid HTML to be created.

HotMetal Pro is the most expensive ($159 list) and certainly one of the more complicated Web authoring packages we reviewed. However, it does provide extensive features. In addition, it uses an "extensible rules file," so that the program can be updated to adhere to the newest standards just by replacing this file. For this reason, if you think you're going to be doing a lot of HTML authoring in the future, you may want to consider HotMetal Pro.

PageMill 2.0 BEST BUY

RATING: *** 1/2

MAC

Of the Macintosh Web page builders that we looked at, Adobe PageMill 2.0 undoubtedly maintains the best balance between intuitive ease of use, sheer power, and overall features. If you need to design a small-business Web page on a Mac, we recommend Adobe PageMill 2.0.

PageMill's features and functionality can be accessed directly from the well-organized and intuitive toolbars at the top of the screen. They offer plenty of formatting options (bold, italic, type size, heading size, and alignment) arranged over a main feature bar that lets you insert items such as objects, rules, checkboxes, radio buttons, text areas, password fields, pop-up menus, tables, and more. The program is so intuitive that we had to rely on pulldown menus to access the Inspector, a floating palette that lets you specify attributes associated with a page, frame, or form, and to access the Pasteboard, which stores elements for later use.

The menus are context-sensitive so that, for example, when you click on a graphic, you're offered buttons for adding hot spots, creating labels, and changing colors. On the right side of the menu bar is a toggle button, which lets you switch between the preview and edit modes in a flash. In addition, the program contains a number of word processing features, such as a find-and-replace command, spell-checker, and a text-importing tool, to simplify text creation within the program.

Creating links in PageMill is quite simple. After highlighting the text you want to link, you simply type the name of the file to which you wish to link into the Link To text area located at the bottom of the screen. Although there is a learning curve, this became a quick way of creating links once we got used to it.

One of the only weak spots we found in this program is a lack of templates to help new users get started. The CD-ROM includes 1,000 images, as well as sample Web sites, sound clips, Java applets, QuickTime movies, Shockwave applications, and a number of nifty Web utilities. With a selling price of $[00, PageMill is a good choice for anyone who is just getting started creating a site and thinks he may want to build more complex Web pages at some point.

Spider 1.2

RATING; **

WIN 95 | WIN

Without a doubt, InContext Spider 1.2 offers the most comprehensive variety of Web language support, including HTML 2.0 and 3.0, as well as Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer extensions. However, there's a price to pay in terms of ease of use. This program was the most confusing of the seven that we examined.

The main screen puts the Structure Editor (a list of HTML tag descriptions) at the left of the screen and the Content Editor (the actual page) at the right. When choosing to insert a new element, we were faced with a daunting list of more than 50 possibilities, many of which will be unintelligible to a first-time user. Creating a bulleted list was confusing as well. To add items to the list, you must place the cursor in the Structure Editor under the last list item and then choose to insert a new element. In some of the other programs in this review, we simply hit the Return key. In addition, despite the program's claims of WYSIWYG editing, no bullets appeared in our bulleted list.