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1 / 5

Our rating

Reviewed price £5 inc VAT

Serif WebPlus X5 makes it pretty straightforward to put together a web site with just a smattering of technical knowledge, but Magix Website Maker 5 goes a step further. This website creation application requires no web knowledge at all and launching an online presence requires nothing more than the ability to click a few buttons and enough imagination to overtype dummy page content with the real thing.

Although Magix Website Maker 5 comes as a boxed CD, there’s nothing to actually install — the disc simply contains a digital copy of the printed manual, some tools and a launcher that leads to the Website Maker 5 web site. In reality, this is actually a cloud-based web creation tool and the service can be accessed from any computer using nothing more than a web browser and an internet connection.

Magix Website Maker 5 is a cloud-based tool that can be accessed using any Flash-enabled web browser

First the bad news; both Magix Website Maker 5 and the web sites it generates are realised wholly in Flash, and this has some usability implications. Biggest of all, this means that published web sites can’t be viewed at all on devices like the iPad, but nor do they behave like ‘normal’ sites when Flash is supported — text can’t be resized or copied, for example. optimising your site to be found by search engines is also a serious problem for Flash-based sites, but such complaints miss the point of this application.

Magix Website Maker 5 isn’t a serious web design tool, it’s a fun and friendly way to put stuff online for people who don’t give two hoots about standards or how web sites work. Better still, the application works on any computer with a Flash-enabled browser, and we tested it on Windows, Mac OS and Google Chrome OS with equal success.

Over 150 templates are included, all split into categories to suit different types of website

To make a site users can start from scratch with a blank page, or with one of over 150 different templates. As with Serif WebPlus X5, starting with a blank page means lots of dragging and dropping of predefined elements, but the process here is more akin to working with PowerPoint crossed with Paint, rather than the DTP-like approach of Serif WebPlus X5. The emphasis is on creating one or more above-the-fold ‘screens’ rather than vertically scrollable pages.

Since the final result is rendered in Flash, Magix Website Maker 5 also offers fewer sophisticated web features — image galleries, embedded media players and guestbooks are available, but site search tools, RSS feeds and forums are not. This simplicity also extends to sites’ composition and only flat structures with no nested pages are possible. This does simplify things for novice users and, if you drop a navigation bar into the page, the application will update it automatically as new pages are added and existing ones renamed.

The main Flash-based interface shows every editable element into a list on the left, with drag-and-drop page features running along the bottom

As with Serif WebPlus X5, however, beginners will get the most polished results from Magix Website Maker 5 by using one of the templates. These are grouped into categories (business, vacation, and so on) and although their colour schemes can’t be edited, each does come with a number of different layouts to suit different page purposes — so there’s no need to shoehorn a contact form into an ‘About us’ layout yourself. The application also offers Wizard-based content creation as part of this template set-up, where each page can be populated with text, images and other media using a simple, step-by-step interface, rather than the busier main design window.

When it comes to publishing a site, Website Maker 5 is tied to hosting provided by Magix — third-party hosting is not supported. This will obviously be a limitation for some, but the major benefit is that publishing a site involves nothing more than clicking a button, and there’s no mention of FTP servers or other web jargon in sight. For £5 a month you get a domain (.com, .net, .biz, .org etc) 10GB of web space and Google AdSense support – around £1 a month more than WebPlus.net, but you do get more space for your Flash content.

In short, anyone looking to develop their coding skills, get to grips with Flash or just develop general purpose web sites is going to be very disappointed with Magix Website Maker 5, but young kids with school projects to work on, the clueless-about-computers and anyone who just wants to get information online with the minimum of fuss will appreciate its dumbed-down (and not necessarily in a bad way) approach.