Avanquest WebEasy 8 Professional

If you’ve never done it before, creating a website can seem like a tall order. Luckily, there are tools available for all levels of ability that can make short work of website creation. WebEasy 8 is an application you run on your computer, so you design and build the site first, then transfer it onto the web when it’s finished.

It uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) approach that borrows heavily from printed-page design software. This makes it easier to get your head around what’s going on, but means that certain elements, such as page sizes, are less flexible. If, for example, you change the size of one page of your site, this will carry across to all the other pages too. On the plus size, it uses cascading style sheets rather than HTML styling to make the pages, so you don’t get the horrific code bloat that you used to see with older WYSIWYG software.

There are lots of options and features to the software and, while creating a web page from a template is pretty straightforward, if you wanted to start from scratch it’s a steep learning curve. There are tutorials and videos to get you going and you can simply include widgets for added extras like Google Maps and photo albums. The software includes three months of pre-paid hosting, which immediately makes things a bit simpler. With this, you get your own webeasysite.com address, but you can still host it elsewhere if you’d prefer.