Software reviews

Adobe 

Muse

While the Web has become ubiquitous, the desire to learn the programming language of the Web, learning HTML, has not. The result has been a growing number of graphical web design tools, working on the 'what you see is what you get' or WYSIWYG principle that is most are familiar with through word processing and desktop publishing tools.

The latest step down this route is the arrival of the first tool to recreate the print design process on the Internet. Adobe Muse will be a hated by some for forcing one medium to fit the constraints of another, and loved by others as enticing many more from a design discipline to move to the Web..

Based on this design-first principle, you might expect Muse to kick things off with a choice of pre-prepared templates. There are one or two, but since we're talking about the design community, Adobe has wisely opted for a minimal approach. The recent commercial launch concentrates on helping users produce unique designs from scratch.

Click the New Site command and you're presented with a simple dialogue box in which you set the page width (the height adjusts dynamically), number of columns, margins and so on, just as you would in a DTP application.

However, when you click OK you're not taken to Design View, but rather to Muse's Plan View. Here you'll see your site presented as a hierarchy of page thumbnails. Building out from your homepage you can quickly add child and sibling pages to create your overall site organisation, and then control and re-order it simply by dragging and dropping.

As well as regular pages, the Plan View lets you add and apply master pages. It's here that you design the overall look and feel by adding repeating elements such as banners, footers and logos. To help set up your master page framework, Muse provides smart layout guides, automatic object snapping, onscreen feedback and easy grouping.

Muse's creative design power initially seems strangely limited, since the only drawing tool provided is the Rectangle tool. However, you can apply solid, gradient and bitmap fills, as well as shadow, glow and transparency effects, rounded corners and bevels, so you'll soon be able to bring your page to life.

Muse also extends its own creative capabilities through integration with other applications. In particular, you can simply copy and paste bitmap graphics into Muse or load and place multiple files, including Photoshop PSD, Fireworks PNG and Flash SWF formats, using the Place Gun.

Importing native Adobe file formats offers greater control, such as the mapping of PSD layers to rollover button states, and also enables round-trip editing.

Windows 

EZGenerator

£120 or free trial

The paid-for version of EZGenerator offers thousands of templates, each with 10 different sub-versions, and then each of these can also be set up as one of seven different types of site – a personal home-page, a business site, a site for a band or sports club, and so on. Once you drop into the editing page for your new site, things are a little less clear, though the ribbon-style toolbar will be familiar to many. The template is already populated with dummy text and pictures which you need to replace, and there will already be a site structure in place.

Publishing, once you have input your hosting service's FTP settings, is very simple. Tell EZGenerator the directory to use – either a local one for testing, or your remote webserver when you are ready to go live – and away it goes. There is a lot to upload – the underlying Web content engine is sophisticated and can generate PHP scripting code if you need to include dynamic site elements such as a blog, guestbook, or online shop. For the latter, you will need a webhosting service that includes MySQL as well as PHP.

It also acts as a content management system, keeping track of what links to where and what has changed, so if you make a change to your local copy and republish, the program regenerates and uploads only those items that have changed. You can also republish the same site with all the content unchanged but with a whole new design. It can cope with multiple websites on different servers, and puts no limits on how many websites you can create or on the number of pages in each. One oddity is that you can set it up to publish a mobile version of the site to small-screen devices, but this means designing and entering a second lot of pages.

Overall, EZGenerator is a very powerful tool that makes sophisticated websites simple to build. Pretty much anything you want can be added to a website – surveys, podcasts, Google Maps, slideshows, even Google Translate to offer your site in other languages. And while its mechanics are normally hidden from view, they are quite easy to access, so the skilled Web designer or programmer can get under the bonnet and do all sorts of additional customisation.

Windows 

Web Studio 5 

$159.99 or free trial

One of the first things you notice about Web Studio is its strong focus on drag-and-drop. It really does make content easy to assemble and organise, adding forms, graphical buttons and menus. It also lets you set up Paypal shopping carts, so there is no need for e-commerce hosting, and you can upload to their hosting or your own.

It provides multiple routes to actions, such as a quick access toolbar and an Office 2010-style ribbon bar. Each element has video tutorials, and there is a caption bar telling you what options are available for the selected page element.

The main workspace can contain multiple tabs, these can also be windowed side by side. You can define a master page which all associated sub-pages will then follow – change the master page and the others all change too.

Web Studio includes design galleries with buttons, graphics, backgrounds, templates and so on; these can be dragged and dropped into the project you are working on, and then double-clicked to edit them. You can also pull page elements in from outside – your own graphics, for example. One useful feature is that Web Studio is modeless, so the same actions and commands do the same thing for any type of element – there is no specific text or graphics editing mode.

It is also intelligent enough to try to do some things for you automatically, so if you drop a link onto an image, say, the system will connect them, or if you drop a Windows '.exe' file onto a page it will create a download link there. One caveat is that Web Studio can only manage projects stored in its own format, and not any existing sites you may have. It is possible to pull in existing HTML and re-use it on a new page though.

It is not quite as easy to get a good basic site online with Web Studio as it is with EZ Generator, say. However, along with its online range of video tutorials, Web Studio makes it simpler and quicker to take those first steps away from the initial template towards a custom site, without diving into HTML, JavaScript and so on - although you can extend it with your own code if need be. Its strong focus on WYSIWYG and drag-and-drop should also make designers feel right at home.

Linux, MacOS, Windows 

BlueGriffon 

Free

You don't have to take the commercial route to do WYSIWYG web editing, as there is open-source software available too. Most of it is multi-platform, which makes it pretty much the only way forward for Linux users who want to edit locally, as the commercial developers rarely port to Linux. One useful factor is that most open-source tools are happy to edit existing Web pages, which is important for website maintenance.

One of the best open source apps for editing is KompoZer. It has not received much attention from its developers in recent months but the current version is still worth a try. Also interesting is SeaMonkey, which is a complete email and Web suite from Mozilla, the developer of Firefox and Thunderbird, with which it shares code. It is not as intuitive or drag-and-drop as the tools aimed at designers, nor does it include templates, so there is a bit of a learning curve. However, it makes it easy to create pages without needing to write any HTML at all.

For a more polished and up-to-date offering that supports drag-and-drop and is reasonably intuitive, take a look at BlueGriffon. It too has its roots in Mozilla, and it provides an effective way to graphically create, view and edit webpages. For the initiated, it also supports the latest HTML5 specifications and lets you set CSS styles and insert elements written in PHP and other scripting codes.

BlueGriffon is not entirely free, however, being funded in part by the sale of add-ons such as a template library, an advanced CSS style sheet editor, a synch tool for mirroring your local edits to your remotely-hosted website – and the manual. The lack of built-in help is a nuisance, but the manual is only about £4, and you can buy the full set of add-ons for around £40.

Remember that whichever graphical tool you choose, at best it will only create the framework for you. So when you go into a website project, you will still need to have your content ready and a plan for your site.

Lastly, using PC software to build your site is only one option. There are also template-based online services from the likes of GoDaddy, Intuit, WebEden and Moonfruit. One advantage of these is that they are operating system-independent, whereas most website creation applications are Windows-based. If you want to be able to edit your site under Linux or on a tablet, say, this could be significant. The downside is that most of them require a continuing monthly subscription and include domain registration and hosting. 

Further information

• www.moonfruit.com/
• www.intuit.com/website-building-software/
• www.webeden.co.uk/build.php
• www.ezgenerator.com/
• www.webstudio.com/
• www.kompozer.net
• www.seamonkey-project.org
• bluegriffon.org/

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