Hiring a Web designer is an ongoing expense. However, designing a Web site yourself can be complicated and time consuming. SJ Namo heard the confusion and has attempted to deliver the solution. WebEditor 2006 Suite (£69) was designed to simplify complicating Web development tasks by using intuitive wizards to guide the way. The result, we’re pleased to say, is that the software lets you build dynamic Web sites that look relatively good and are easy to deploy and maintain - within just a few hours!
WebEditor 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 with WebEditor closely resembles what you would see if you were to open the page in a Web browser. This visual orientation makes Namo WebEditor different from ‘code-oriented’ HTML editors, in which you edit HTML code directly (although you can also do that in WebEditor). Panels also make it easy to find formatting commands and content libraries. Tools for inserting layers, tables, flash content, images, JavaScript, and frames are also easy to locate.
WebEditor 2006 Suite includes WebEditor 2006, WebCanvas 2006, and other free tools, has strong basic HTML functions, and is convenient to use for anyone from beginners to experts. In fact, it’s one of the most complete Web authoring applications for creating, editing, publishing and manage your Web sites. WebCanvas 2006 is a decent vector-based Web graphic drawing tool optimised for use with WebEditor 2006, making it easy to create and manage all graphic resources in a unified environment.
WebCanvas helps you create attractive, fast-downloading graphic images. It fully supports the SVG file format, allowing preview of SVG files in a Web browser and export images in a variety of file formats. The software offers familiar pen and polygon tools let you easily draw any shape, no matter how complex. You can even wse layers to manage paths and simplify your work. Get creative with text, use clipping masks to blend drawing objects or blend an object with a bitmap image, and create rollover buttons that integrate perfectly with WebEditor’s navigation bars.
Free bonus utilities include a screen capture utility for acquiring the contents of windows, menus, screens, and so on (especially useful for writers of technical documentation) in GIF or BMP format, and an innovative utility that you can use to ‘slice’ bitmap images into smaller pieces for faster loading in browsers. Image Slicer 1.5 exports sliced images straight to HTML, so you can easily insert them into your Web pages. It also converts Photoshop (PSD) files to GIF, JPG, or PNG format. Finally, GIF Animator is an easy-to-use program to create animated GIF images from your own still images.
The key new features in Namo WebEditor 2006 suite include quick-select menus which appear when you start typing a tag, attribute, or CSS property in the HTML window, as well as the ability to directly post a document to your blog; or download an existing post, edit, then re-upload it to the blog.
You can now save documents in fully standards-compliant XHTML format, and new visual aids let you work on a table and optionally view the width and its cell in a bar at the top of the table. You can also click an image in Edit mode, whereby the display and actual size are displayed below the image. You can also calculate based on numbers in table cells, then insert the result in another cell, as well as use tracing ‘under’ a document to help lay it out (invisible in browsers).
The largest part of WebEditor’s main window is taken up by the document window, the workspace where you create and edit a Web document. At first, when you start a new document, the document window is an empty white space. To build a Web document, you fill the window with content - the elements that make up a Web page - by typing words, dragging and dropping image files from your hard disk, and so forth.
At the bottom of the document window are a set of mode tabs, labelled Edit, Edit & HTML, HTML, and Preview. You use these tabs to switch among WebEditor’s three basic modes of operation: Edit (edit documents visually), HTML (document window shows the HTML source code that underlies the current document), and Preview (displays the current document exactly as it would appear in the version of Internet Explorer that is installed on your computer). Clicking the Edit & HTML tab shows Edit mode and HTML mode simultaneously in a split window.
WebEditor also makes it easy to insert videos, audio recordings, Flash animations, and other multimedia objects into your Web documents. With the Media Wizard, you can add a video or audio file to any document and have it play right on the page using Windows Media Player, QuickTime, or RealOne Player, in just a few simple steps. If you have a media file that is not supported by Windows Media Player, QuickTime, or RealPlayer, but you know an ActiveX control that supports it, you can still insert the media file into a Web document.
Similarly, you can insert any media file that is supported by a Netscape-style browser plug-in. You can insert Java applets, as well as Excel worksheets (formatting of the worksheet is preserved as closely as possible, within the limitations of HTML).
SJ Namo’s WebEditor Suite 2006 provides most of the tools you need to develop basic Web sites to more complex Web designs, at a very reasonable cost. It comes with lots of special tools and Wizards to assist everyone from the relatively experienced (we don’t recommend it for absolute beginners) to design experts, and the bundled applications for vector graphics, screen capture, GIF animation, and image slicing are greatly appreciated. We especially liked the fact that you can add line art and text to your images without having to leave the program.
The interface is relatively easy-to-use, although until you get used to the software you’ll quite often find yourself wondering what to do next. Serious Dreamweaver users will also find fault with several coding conventions. For example, WebEditor does not edit externally stored cascading style sheets. Nor does it colour-code scripts, provide code hints. When you consider the extremely low price, however, WebEditor Suite 2006 is a neat alternative for users who have outgrown freeware Web-editing tools (such as ), especially as it’ll grow along with your skill level and development needs.
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