BIOS: Technology Means Business

WebEditor 6.0 Suite is an excellent software package that provides aspiring Web developers with most of the tools they need in order to generate sophisticated sites with multilevel architectures, predefined design themes, database-driven content, dynamically generated navigation, and JavaScript interactivity. It's not without its faults, though. In particular, there's no predefined scripts for novice users or robust optimisation functions for exported bitmaps, it doesn't allow you to edit externally stored cascading style sheets, nor does it offer colour-coded scripts, code hints or auto-complete tags. Nevertheless, you'll not find a more complete and easy-to-use Web development package for the price.

Pros: WYSIWYG editing; database connectivity; auto scripting
Cons: Basic bitmap optimisation and coding tools

Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 (£339 ex. VAT) is the undisputed king of Web development, but its powerful features and lack of hand-holding features create an environment that's hard to work with unless you're a seasoned developer. WebEditor 6.0 Suite, on the other hand, is an easy-to-use and featured packed visual-based Web authoring application that delivers a comprehensive set of tools needed in order to produce decent Web sites quickly.

The latest version of the software builds on WebEditor 5.5 by adding some new features and more applications. For instance, in addition to the vector-based Web graphic drawing program WebCanvas 1.1, WebEditor 6.0 Suite now features WebBoard, a Web community builder tool that lets you set up any number of forums through a simple Windows application on your desktop. However, WebCanvas still does not include predefined scripts for beginners or robust optimisation functions for exported bitmaps.

WebEditor 6.0 Suite is designed for those who are either new to creating Web sites, or non-professional developers who need to build a Web site quickly without requiring fine control over site design, structure and database connectivity. Similar to many other programs of its type, WebEditor 6.0 Suite is a visual, or WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Web authoring program. This means that what you see on the screen while you are creating or editing a Web page closely resembles what you would see if you were to open the page in a Web browser.

Creating a site is a snap, especially if you follow the software's wizard-driven interface. Simply start by selecting one of over 200 fundamental themes and templates, add or remove text and images from a page design using automatic layout tables and drag-and-drop procedures, and then publish your Web site to your Web server. You can also split the document window into Edit and HTML panes, making it easier to go back and forth between visual and source editing, and the Formatting panel lets you apply heading levels or custom styles to text content.

The new Shortcut Bar provides one-click access to some frequently-used commands to do things like publish a site or insert a Script Wizard effect, and the Tag Selector appears in the lower panel area whenever you are in Edit mode, revealing the HTML tags of the current element and its ancestors. We also liked that the Inspector box now shows properties for many more element types than in the previous version, and that the software now supports creating inline frames (iframes) and floating boxes in Edit mode.

The Color Palette now displays recently-used colours and has a menu from which you can select various palettes, including custom colour sets, which a neat time-saving feature, and you can now specify custom scrollbar colours for a document. Other key improvements include the ability to directly assign a class or ID in Edit mode to many element types, including paragraphs, other block elements, spans, images, table cells, layers, and so forth, which makes using CSS styles in Edit mode more convenient. The Media Wizard makes it easier to add video and audio objects to your pages, and you can now specify up to five Web browsers for previewing your documents before publishing.

Although WebEditor 6.0 Suite is a relatively low-cost application, it includes several powerful site maintenance tools. For example, you can find files in a local site or folder that match a specified file name pattern with the new Find Files command, you can now save a local site as a template for use with the Site Wizard (preserves every aspect of a site when you save it as a template), the Site Manager's site tree view by default now uses larger document icons that show both file name and navigation name, and a new command button in the Resource Manager lets you zip and e-mail a folder full of resources in one step.

WebEditor 6.0 Suite now supports Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), in addition to Microsoft's SourceSafe, for source control, and a new Site Library panel acts as a library of all the resource files, documents, and hyperlinks in use in the current site. You can now open a document on a Web server, edit it, and then re-save it directly to the server without manually downloading and uploading it, and the new Quick Publish command lets you upload only selected files to your Web server.

New commands also let you open a document from and save a document to a Web server directly, without having to download or upload it through the Publish window, and if you have a Web server running on your local computer or a server on the local area network, you can now specify a local or network folder as a remote site for publishing using direct file copy rather than FTP.

More experienced Web authors should also appreciate the split-screen view of both the WYSIWYG page layout and HTML code, support of server-side includes and the fact that when you edit a shared block in its source file, every copy of it in other documents can be automatically updated with one click. The software now supports inserting Server-Side Include (SSI) commands in Edit mode, and it can validate a document's source code against the XHTML standard and check it for compatibility with several versions of the most popular browsers. There's also a handy online HTML/CSS reference, should you need it.

To make the development process a little more intuitive, there's a property inspector tool that edits attributes in real time, over 80 JavaScript actions to add interactive effects, as well as a script manager for viewing, inserting and editing scripts. ASP, JSP or PHP database-driven pages can be created using wizards, and automatic report generation helps to identify site problems. Finally, a resource manager can be used to store, view and manage images, colours, links, scripts, templates and more.

The suite is also supplied with a comprehensive range of additional utilities that make it possible to create a basic Web site without even leaving the program. WebCanvas 1.1, for instance, is a vector-based Web graphic drawing tool that can be used to create fast-downloading graphic images, such as logos, buttons, and banners for your site. It fully supports the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) file format, allowing you to preview SVG files in a Web browser and export images in SVG format.

Familiar pen and polygon tools let you easily draw shapes, and you can use layers to manage paths and simplify your work. You can also convert text into paths and use clipping masks to blend drawing objects or blend an object with a bitmap image. There's also a Sheets feature for creating rollover buttons that integrate with WebEditor's navigation bars, allowing you to create rollover effects.

Namo's Capture is a screen capture utility, whilst Image Slicer allows bitmap images to be 'sliced' (broken down) for faster loading into browsers and GIF Animator lets you create animated GIFs from still images. There's also a clip art library of thousands of ready-to-use buttons, banners and icons, so you can add a dash a multimedia to your site. Finally, WebBoard is a Web bulletin board builder that offers various tools to install and use a bulletin forum without having to go through complex procedures normally associated with other programmes.

As we've already mentioned, WebEditor 6.0 Suite provide aspiring Web developers with most of the tools they need in order to generate sophisticated sites with multilevel architectures, predefined design themes, database-driven content, dynamically generated navigation, and JavaScript interactivity. Having said that, it's not without its faults. In particular, it does not allow you to edit externally stored cascading style sheets, nor does it colour-code scripts or provide code hints or auto-complete tags. Nevertheless, you'll not find a more complete and easy-to-use Web development package for the price.