Web Easy Professional 4 Review Half Advanced, Half Backward John P. Mello Jr.
If you prefer, you can skip the prefab route and build your Web site from scratch. When doing so, Web Easy Pro gives you some blank templates for various screen resolutions -- 640 by 480, 800 by 600, and 1,024 by 768 pixels -- and page lengths -- one, three, or six.
After choosing a template for your blank pages, you can start cobbling together your site with the program's Edit Taskbar. From here, you can add elements to your pages or customize the program's templates. You can manipulate photos and text, create shapes and arrange page objects, and add links, pages, and multimedia elements. When you click on a taskbar icon, a relevant set of tools appear on the application's toolbar.
One noteworthy tool that can be accessed from the Edit Taskbar is the Link Map Assistant. As you build a Web site and its pages multiply, remembering what's linked to what can be tricky. This assistant makes managing your links much less of a mental chore.
Web Easy is photo-oriented (indeed, one line on V Communications' site says, "Easily create your photo Web site today!"). Images from digital cameras can be directly imported into the program, and a photo browser at the bottom of the screen shows thumbnail images in a filmstrip. You can drag photos from the strip to your Web page.
Sometimes, though, the program is finicky about where it will allow you to drop a photo. For example, I tried to drop an image into a shape on one occasion, and Web Easy Pro wouldn't do it. When I tried dropping the photo outside the shape, though, it worked fine -- and once it was on the page, I could drag the photo into the shape.
And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
When you've finished your site, Web Easy can upload it to a server for you. From the Home taskbar, you simply click on "build" and the pages for your site will be created in HTML or Dynamic HTML. Then the program will request the info it needs to place your site online.
Although Web Easy asks if the site will be your primary one on your server, it isn't smart enough to realize that the home page for a primary site must be named index.html. So you need to know a little about file-naming conventions before you publish your site.
The program also performs a devious operation when creating a site for you: It makes the home page an advertisement for Web Easy and V Communications, which will flash on a visitor's screen before your first page appears. Happily, if you erase that page and rename your home page, your site will work fine without it.
Although Web Easy Professional strives to combine ease of use with sophisticated features, it may puzzle some novices. Not only the tutorial but the documentation is incomplete; you can follow the steps for a task in the program's manual and fail to achieve the desired results, though with some experimentation you'll usually find the right combination of steps to get what you want.
More accomplished designers, as mentioned, will be vexed by the absence of an HTML editor or source view for manually tuning pages. In addition, the program's performance was sluggish even on our Pentium 4 desktop -- scrolling a displayed page can leave contrails on your monitor as the program refreshes the screen.
Beginners who don't need the GIF animator, e-commerce or VRML support, or the ability to create their own shapes (and who can live with some 50 rather than 100 handsome templates) will probably prefer the basic Web Easy package, priced at $40. Web Easy Professional offers more features, but is an idiosyncratic package that stumbles somewhere between novice and power-user status.
