Thread: Homepage Maker Ultimate v 6.0

WEBSITE BUILDER Everybody has a website these days, or at the very least a blog. In fact it is quite important to be online to showcase your skills, so if you are on the lookout for a new method for building a website, then maybe you should take a look at Homepage Maker 6.

Features
The best thing about Homepage Maker is that it works using your default Web browser, so you can either make changes to your Web pages from home, the office, or from a computer anywhere in the world. The requests to make changes from a remote machine are processed using the Internet as a conduit. It's also easy to use, with a simple wizard to help you get started. A new project or website is created using either one of five project types-personal, business, e-commerce, society and community. Each project type consists of many templates, which determine
the appearance of the website.

Once the template has been chosen, the next phase is to choose a website structure. This involves selecting the pages you want on your site. There is an entire range of pages apart from the home page, including pages for a photo gallery, shop, chat, blog, video gallery, news, contact, disclaimer, terms and conditions, about, links, imprint, search and guestbook. Each project type comes with two or more website structures that can be used as defaults if you are not sure which pages to include. Click 'Finish' and the program begins the process of creating the project and its related Web pages. It also has a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You Get) editor, for a real-time preview of any content that you modify.



Performance
Homepage Maker supports blogs, e-shops, chat, news, PHP, RSS feeds and picture galleries-it can also create backups. Besides, the application also has the capability to manage several projects at the same time and publishing their contents can be scheduled. The concept of being able to edit websites locally as well as remotely (as long as there are some essential program components installed in the Web space) intrigued us and it seemed like a professional solution with its flexibility.

Unfortunately, we were disappointed with the reality of its performance. First of all, it was not entirely easy working with the program since it doesn't operate all that smoothly in the Web browser-a lack of classic menus, a structured interface and well thought out wizards are the main drawbacks of the program. This becomes readily apparent when, for instance, you replace the background graphic in the layout template. The user manual doesn't have any explicit instructions for further assistance. As for the generated HTML code-it is not perfect, and when we ran it through the Markup Validation Service it threw up errors, although these are inconspicuous in current-day browsers.

VERDICT: It's an innovative attempt at making Web design and creation easier for the layman, but not well conceived. FOR: Build and maintain websites remotely. AGAINST: The operation is too complicated for beginners.