Dreamtoolz Homepage Creator

Never has so much simplicity cost so little.

Price: £30

Manufacturer: Dreamtoolz

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Verdict

For a first-time web designer this is far more suitable than Frontpage. If you steer clear of the templates you can design unique, attractive sites in well under an hour.

Nik Rawlinson, Personal Computer World 07 May 2002

If you consider yourself anything other than a web-design novice then you're bound to be rather sniffy about Homepage Creator. It has none of the power of Dreamweaver, Go Live or even Frontpage, but it bypasses the complexity, and the results are very competent. The first-time designer should immediately understand the minimalist interface, and will be turning out pages in under an hour.

The screen is devoid of any controls beyond two toolbars - one for common tasks and the other to define objects on your page. But these deceptively simple buttons hide some complex coding tasks. Insert an image and it is automatically shrunk for speedy downloads, after which it can be rotated and drop shadows added: even Dreamweaver would have to resort to using Fireworks or Photoshop to achieve an effect like this.

Even more impressive, though, is the rollover function, which writes intricate code into the page so images react when a mouse is passed over them. Combine this with the ability to place text on top of the image, add a hyperlink and a drop shadow and you have an attractive and rather complex button in a matter of minutes.

The package can be unfriendly at times, though, and lets you get yourself into trouble without warning. We managed to knit a tangled web of errors that only became apparent once we went to preview the site in a browser.

To preview pages, Homepage Creator must first render them as HTML, and this is when the debugging takes place. We rotated and overlaid several images, then applied drop shadows and text. Then, pushing the software to the limit we asked it to generate rollover states for each picture, which it did without complaint.

When we went to preview our work, though, it threw up an error for every image, which we felt was poorly explained and shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the first place. The only remedy was to step back through each image and remove the effect through a control palette.

The code generated is fairly complex, with a healthy mix of style sheets and layers, so it won't display the way you want in older browsers. But that shouldn't be a problem, as few users are running anything earlier than a version 5 browser. If it does encounter users with older browsers it will automatically detect the version and display an error message stating browser incompatibility.

Homepage Creator includes a range of sample images, animated gifs and backgrounds, as well as templates that will help your site look identical to any other created with the package. These may appeal to the first-time user, but it's well worth taking advantage of the gentle learning curve this software presents to spur you on to create your own alternatives.

There are some obvious but serious omissions, such as the ability to change the colour of links, whether visited or not. Our test site had a graduated black-to-white background, and where our text overran the black areas, visited links, rendered in the default purple, were very difficult to read.

In other places the authors seem to have lost their impetus and either lapsed into poorly explained jargon or non-standard terms. The panel you use to enter FTP settings makes no attempt to explain the concept of proxy servers and ports, while it uses the term Catalog, explaining that 'the field Catalog is only needed if you want to publish your Homepage to a subdirectory on your server'. Why not just call it a 'subdirectory' instead?

Despite its rough edges, you have to admire the way Homepage Creator packs so many complex functions into a non-threatening interface. It's free to download, but if you want to use it more than five times you'll have to pay a £30 registration fee. Never has so much simplicity cost so little.

System requirements

166MHz processor, Windows 9x, ME, 2000, XP, NT4 or later, 32MB Ram, 16MB free hard drive space, 16bit colour display, version 4 or later browser

Contact

Dreamtoolz: www.dreamtoolz.com/uk

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