November 11, 1999

A Web Page Kit Full of Tools for Beginners

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

COMPLETE WEB STUDIO 2.0
(Sierra Home; $79.95; Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0.)

It seems everybody has a Web site these days -- businesses, television shows, grandmothers and pets. If you're feeling left out, Sierra Home has recently released its Complete Web Studio 2.0 software for home users. The program is designed for people who just want to make a Web site on their own, without having to marry an HTML manual or invest in high-end Web development programs like Adobe's GoLive or Macromedia's Dreamweaver. Web Studio not only makes creating a Web site about as easy as pointing and clicking, but it can also make uploading the site to the Web a breeze, even for nontechnical users.

Actually, ""dragging and dropping"" might be a more appropriate comparison, because that is what you pretty much do to create a page with Complete Web Studio. The program, on two CD's, comes with more than 37,000 graphics, photographs, backgrounds, animations, sounds and page templates.

Simplifying the making of Web pages, from layout to uploading.


If you have spent any amount of time on the Web, you have probably run into your fair share of truly hideous and poorly designed sites. Many of them are most likely labors of love from people still learning this relatively new medium. The Web Studio program gives you a generous number of templates that you can select and modify to your own tastes.

The overall look of the templates is quite conservative, but there seems to be one for every occasion, including graphically appropriate blueprints named such things as ""A history links page!"" and ""A page about your auto collection!"" Perhaps in an attempt to cover all bases, the template file also contains such narrowly focused themes as ""A page about Grandpa in the war"" and ""A page for your Japanese exchange family.""

To make a Web page with the program, you simply pick a template or start with a blank work space, and then drag and drop desired page elements into place. Tiny samples of all potential page parts are arranged on a multilayered, tabbed palette next to the main on-screen work space. To add a colorful background to your page, click on the sample and drag it onto the main window. You can type in and style your own text, add your own pictures or choose from the vast array of clip art and stock photos.

Some of the clip art and backgrounds included look a bit amateurish, but there are scads of others to choose from. You can shift and move items around on the canvas and even place things like hit counters and calendars on your page. Web Studio allows you to drag and drop links from your browser's Bookmarks or Favorites file, and you can easily add more pages to your site to link to the first one you have created.

Once you have completed your site, Web Studio will convert your creation to HTML and save your file and all its parts in a folder. The program is fairly intuitive to use, but if you do have questions, Web Studio conveniently comes with multimedia tutorials to explain the steps and a 110-page manual.

As software manuals go, this one is fairly understandable, although it tries to water down some subjects too much. In Chapter 6, which explains how to get your newly made site off your hard drive and onto the Internet, the manual refers to File Transfer Protocol, or F.T.P., as ""Friendly virTual Postman."" Although the manual's index gives the proper rendering, it is somewhat aggravating to see abbreviation abuse in a program aimed at nontechnical users who are probably easily confused as it is.

But on the subject of F.T.P., users don't really have to know what it is anyway, because the Web Studio's Upload Wizard takes the headache out of uploading the finished site to the Web for all to see. The Upload Wizard allows you to post the page by typing in a user name and password and clicking with the mouse a few times. The program contains a database of many popular Internet service providers that provide free Web space to their members (like America Online, MindSpring and Xoom), which provides an even faster shortcut to uploading.

Complete Web Studio 2.0 also includes two other programs: SnapShot Express, a picture-editing application, and iCollect, which lets you download entire Web sites for offline browsing and study. A recent version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, required for the program's Help files, is included on one of the CD's as well.

To install Web Studio, at minimum you will need a PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a Pentium-class 100-megahertz processor, a CD-ROM drive and 50 megabytes of hard drive space. Web Studio runs better with 32 megabytes of RAM, though, and the standard install needs 160 megabytes of hard drive space.

All in all, Complete Web Studio works well in its mission of bringing easy site creation to the nontechnical masses. Using the software is vaguely reminiscent of tossing items into a shopping cart in an enormous supermarket -- except instead of a week's worth of meals, you have a complete Web site when you're done.




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