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