BIOS: Technology Means Business

Creating and customising complete Web page designs and fully-functioning Web photo albums can be a time consuming process. Webstyle, however, offers a fairly intuitive interface and workflow processes, as well as a good selection of templates and graphics that are accessible and easily customisable to even the most entry-level graphics users. If you're new to Web design, Webstyle lets you create decent-looking Web pages in a matter of minutes, rather than days. Experienced developers should look elsewhere.

Pros: Easy to use; decent templates; good image-handling tools
Cons: Limited authoring tools

Webstyle 4 is a low-cost Web graphics application for non-developers, but its main selling point is its relative simplicity. Even if you've never created a Web site before, or even manipulated or optimised images, Webstyle will let you create complete Web page designs and Web-ready photo albums quickly and easily. Webstyle is not a Web authoring program, though, but is a graphic design program, which means it's designed to be used in conjunction with a Web authoring application. Webstyle lets you create a Web site's graphics, buttons, menus and the HTML framework which can then be opened in a Web authoring program for fine-tweaking and integrated with a database or e-commerce system, if necessary.

The software facilitates the process of creating Web-ready graphics quickly and easily thanks to its supplied page templates, fonts and graphics. More experienced developers can also benefit from the software's improved integration with leading Web-authoring programs, such as Dreamweaver and Frontpage. The software's new tools sit alongside its existing features, enabling you to create and position the bread-and-butter Web graphics you're likely to need when designing a Web page, such as navigation bars with DHTML/JavaScript menus, headings, buttons, bullets, banner advertisements, dividers, themed graphic sets, logos and photos.

Upon opening the software, you're presented with a choice of creating a range of Web page elements, but most users will go straight to the Web page designs or themesets. If you select Web page, all the elements of a Web page are presented as a template, which you can then customise. A themeset consists of a heading graphic (usually with a one line and two line variant), a paragraph heading (smaller heading for use in the text), a logo (simple graphic symbol) with space for a company name, a small bullet graphic for use in bulleted lists, a divider graphic (horizontal rule), a vertical NavBar (button bar) for placing navigation links down the side of a page, a horizontal NavBar for placing links along the top of a page, and a button graphic for stand-alone page links that you might want separate from a NavBar.

Once you change a theme colour, for example, Webstyle automatically creates all the graphics required for the Web page. Likewise, if you edit a theme colour, Webstyle creates what it thinks are appropriate shades of that colour to help keep the design consistent. Graphic properties of these templates can then be customised, such as colours, fonts, text, size and background. Additional templates can be automatically downloaded into Webstyle as and when they become available, although some templates carry a fee.

If you intend to produce a Web site with multiple pages, Webstyle lets you create graphic NavBars (button bars) with cascading menus and sub-menus. The software adds all the required DHTML and JavaScript, leaving you with just the task of naming the sub headings. Key features of the NavBar tools include the automatic creation of mouse-over highlighting, cascading, hierarchical and drop-down menus.

If you intend to use photographs on your site, WebStyle's new photo-enhancement tool can be used to automatically 'enhance' the contrast, brightness, sharpness and colour saturation images with a single-click. More experienced users can alter RGB levels, manually crop and scale images, and add backgrounds. Once you've created a thumbnail, the image can be previewed in a browser. Xara also provides information on the file size and how long it expects it to download over various connection types, such as 56Kbit/s, IDSN (64Kbit/s) and 512Kbit/s DSL. You can also create a photo album-style page design using the software's Photo Album feature, whereby Webstyle generates all the photo thumbnails and DHTML/JavaScript code. Photos can be organised into named groups and you can add a title, description or caption to each photo.

Webstyle also incorporates the same 3D graphics engine used in its Xara3D product. While not as flexible as Xara3D, Webstyle lets you quickly and easily create 3D headings, which you may want to use to create a company heading or page name. Many of the logo designs use a symbol or shape from one of the special symbol fonts bundled with Webstyle, with a total of around 60 different master designs that can be customised. Those who already have a Web site may be interested to know that Webstyle includes fairly basic animated banner ad creation tools. More than 80 customisable designs are included, allowing you to alter the wording, font, colours and sizes. There's no option to alter the animation sequences, however, or create banner ads from scratch.

Links:
Webstyle 4 Web site
Webstyle 4 15-day trial (14.3MB)