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1 / 4

Our rating

Reviewed price £82 inc VAT

WebPlus X5 is the latest version of this foolproof web site design application. The package is billed as a ‘business’ tool, but it’s suitable for use by anyone with small to medium web site ambitions, but who also lacks the technical know-how to realise them in raw HTML or a heavyweight application like Adobe Dreamweaver.

WebPlus X5 is very much a WYSIWYG web editor that keeps code out of sight and instead favours a drag and drop design approach. That’s not to say it places any constraints on how pages are created, and ambitious types with distinct ideas can start with a blank document and then assemble a layout from scratch using a variety of predefined web elements. Text frames, image frames, buttons and navigation bars can all be dragged onto a page from the ‘QuickBuilder Bar’ and then formatted, much like in a DTP application, using a range of toolbars, palettes and Properties dialog boxes.

The WebPlus X5 interface mimics that of other Serif applications and makes extensive use of drag-and-drop tools for page creation and DTP-like options for formatting

Basic page structure in place, more web furniture can then be dropped into place from the Flyout toolbar that runs down the left of the WebPlus X5 window. These range from simple things like image galleries, creatively formatted text for logos, tables and embedded multimedia, to far more sophisticated content like site search tools, RSS feeds and JavaScript-powered pop-ups. WebPlus X5 also offers three e-commerce options, including PayPal, although the emphasis here is on ease of set-up rather than flexibility. Even so, the fact that WebPlus X5 can create a basic online sales site within a matter of minutes without the need to worry about any server-side set up makes this a promising application for a fledging internet business.

WebPlus X5 can also be used to create entire structured sites using a simple tree-structured interface that provides full control over page metadata

A similar Wizard-led approach is also used to implement more sophisticated online features like forums and blogs. The learning curve does get a little steeper here, but WebPlus X5 completely does away with the need to worry about server-side PHP installs and mySQL databases. Instead, these are inserted as ‘Smart Objects’ into a site. Serif provides a 12-month WebPlus.net hosting package as part of the WebPlus X5 purchase price, but Smart Objects are stored for free on Serif’s servers.

With all the necessary configuration and coding handled by WebPlus X5, the user just has to provide some relatively simple set-up information to get things going. The Help system could be a little more supportive in explaining this process, but anyone with a basic understanding of what a forum or blog is about should be able to figure things out quickly enough.

WebPlus.net doesn’t have to be used for site hosting, as WebPlus X5 can publish a site to any host via FTP (Smart Objects are still stored on Serif’s servers, though). However, with WebPlus.net you get domain name registration for one .com or .co.uk address, 2GB of space and 25GB a month bandwidth and fool-proof integration with the application, which makes it very suitable for novices. After the first year hosting costs £4 a month or £40 for a year’s package, which is reasonable. Smart Object bandwidth is measured separately and capped at 500MB a month, but Serif assured us that this has so far been ample for its users.

WebPlus X5 includes support for some surprisingly sophisticated features, including e-commerce, forums and blogs

Although it deliberately hides the underlying code, WebPlus X5 will still display the source for any WYSIWYG-created page — although it can’t be edited within the application. HTML pages can be created from scratch, however, and inserted into an existing site structure, but this then precludes the use of any WYSIWYG tool on that page. For most users though, the option to embed HTML code fragments into existing pages should be enough for such things as web analytics and offsite content for advertising purposes (although user-friendly Google AdSense support is built in).

As easy as WebPlus X5 makes web page creation, building a site from scratch takes time, effort and a strong eye for design. A better approach for most people will to use one of the 20-odd themed templates that cover a variety of site styles. Some do smack of Web 1.0, but the broad range of tasteful colour schemes and multiple page layouts (there are different ones for Home, About us, Contact us, and so on) do at least offer plenty of flexibility. Simply replacing the dummy text with live content should then be enough to launch some sites, but all the aforementioned tools can be deployed in the same drag-and-drop fashion for infinite customisation.

Anyone who wants more cosmetic control over a web site than services such as WordPress can offer, but who doesn’t want to get their hands dirty with code, would do well to give Serif WebPlus X5 a try. As with any WYSIWYG design application, it can’t provide the required design skills to produce a visually stunning page, but the ease and speed with which it allows surprisingly sophisticated pages to be created means that users can concentrate on how their site looks rather than having to figure out how it works.