Web Easy Professional 4 Review Advanced Web Sites for Novice Webmasters John P. Mello Jr.
Fri 9/27/02 -- Packing professional power into software usable by rank amateurs has been the grail of many a programming Sir Gawain, but all too often these coding crusades wind up as tragically as did their historical counterparts.
That's not quite the case with V Communications' Web Easy Professional 4, a site builder that crams numerous high-end features -- from an animated GIF creator to VRML support for page transitions and special effects -- into a bargain package ($70 boxed or $60 as a download). But the program's occasional quirks and scanty documentation may frustrate novices, while its all-visual, drag-and-drop approach can frustrate more experienced designers who'd like access to an HTML editor for tweaking pages.
Installation of the program was uneventful -- the way most PC users like it. The setup menu offers to add several "extras" to your system. Some of these, like Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Internet Explorer, you may already have installed; others, like the Cosmo 3D VRML viewer, are needed to use some of Web Easy's advanced features. The menu even includes a link for enabling your yet-to-be-created Web site for e-commerce, with a shopping cart and credit-card processing.
Getting Started
When you launch Web Easy Pro, an Activity Center window appears. From here, you can gain quick access to tools for creating a site via the program's Assistant wizard, building one from scratch or supplied templates, importing images from a digital camera, accessing the program's tutorial, and publishing a site to the Web. (V Communications plugs its own iEasySite.com hosting service, which starts at $9.95 per month.)
The abovementioned tutorial is woefully weak, intended more to show what you can do with the program than actually how to do anything -- for example, how anyone could write an HTML tutorial without mentioning the word table left me dumbfounded. If you don't know anything about HTML, let alone DHTML or VRML, you're not going to learn any more from Web Easy's tutorial.
Most of the real tutoring is done through "cue cards," pop-up windows that appear when you perform a task. Although helpful, the cards can become irritating quickly.
The easiest way to set up a site is via the Assistant. Once launched, the latter offers numerous templates organized in categories such as Family and Personal, Hobbies and Events, Organizations and Clubs, and Small Business. These are artfully done and have a nicely professional look and feel.
After you choose a template and location (on your hard disk) for your new site, Assistant asks you for information to customize the Web pages it creates for you. The difficulty here is that the sample pages are so small you can barely see what's on them; this means that for some items, such as photo placement, you don't have much context for making customization decisions.
Once you've customized your template, you can preview it in your Web browser before saving it, then edit the full-sized pages in Web Easy. To modify the elements of a page, you simply double-click them.
