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Computer Times
Editors' Choice Web Editor Namo WebEditor Suite 2006 Review by Terry Kibiloski
Namo WebEditor Suite 2006 (Retail on the Web $74.95 - $99.99), from SJ Namo Interactive, provides all you need to develop everything from quick beginner Web sites to complex Web designs, at a very reasonable cost. It comes with lots of special tools and Wizards to assist everyone from beginners to Web design experts. Namo WebEditor Suite 2006 includes applications for vector graphics, screen capture, GIF animation, and image slicing. As you will see by our review, it doesn't get any better than this. Namo WebEditor has an easy-to-use interface that provides what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) images. It also provides four views of your Web site: WYSIWYG edit view, HTML, both WYSIWYG and HTML at the same time, and a preview mode to simulate your Web page in a Web browser where all of your hyperlinks are active. The basic format of the Namo WebEditor user interface is shown below.
During our testing, we developed a quick beginner Web site using the Site Wizard. You can go to http://spiritualcounseling.net/index.html to view the actual results. This Web site took us less that 30 minutes to create, which definitely passed our beginner test with flying colors, showing that this product is perfect for those beginners who are just getting their feet wet in Web design. Once you have a basic Web site designed, you can drag and drop images and multimedia files to make it come alive. We especially liked the fact that you can add line art and text to your images without having to leave the program. If you wish to get more creative, the included WebCanvas offers loads of professional features for working with vector graphics. While there are a few tutorials, you will not find a complete Web design class for absolute beginners who have no clue about Web design. For these folks, I would suggest a basic how-to book or Namo's support Web site where you will find a searchable base of information plus free user forums. Also, you will find the Help feature, within the program, to be quite useful and well structured. If you wish to go a little beyond basic, you will find hundreds of templates to choose from to further customize your Web pages to suit your own taste. The Site Wizard also has a lot of nice themes that are easy to review before choosing the one you desire. You can edit these themes and apply them to the pages you choose. Like many Web site editors, you will be able to quickly insert, delete, and rearrange pages while the program automatically adjusts your Navigation bar to reflect the changes. This WebEditor Suite has its own unique interface with easy-to-locate panels and tools that make it easy to find and use content libraries, formatting commands, layers, tables, flash content, images, JavaScript, and frames. Some features are a few levels deep inside dialog boxes, but we found everything fairly well placed. While you can type directly into your Web page, you can also import text from the Site Library or through the File menu. As we have found for virtually all programs we have tested, if you have complex word processing files, copying and pasting from an open document is better than importing the entire file. Whether you have experience with HTML code or not, you will find the HTML editor very easy to use, plus you will be pleased with its very straightforward HTML code. Beyond HTML, you will find XHTML, 80+ JavaScript actions, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), blog posting, and WebDAV collaboration. In addition to WebEditor 2006, the Namo WebEditor 2006 suite includes WebCanvas 2006, which is a standalone vector-based Web graphic authoring tool that provides an intuitive interface and professional graphics editing features (see screen shot below). WebCanvas lets you create and modify images for your Web site as vector images. This is important because vector images are created using mathematical expressions, rather than using traditional bit maps that get fuzzy when enlarged and produce very large files. Instead, vector images have relatively small file sizes, which means your Web pages will load faster, and they can be resized with no loss of image definition or clarity.
A few of our favorite features in this suite include the Photo Album, Info Bar, Library, Smart ClipArt, Namo Capture, Namo Image Slicer, and Namo GIF Animator. The Photo Album feature lets you save your settings when you create a photo album and then reuse them when you create another photo album.
The Info Bar displays some nice sizing information. When you work on a table, Namo WebEditor optionally shows the widths of the table and its cells in a bar at the top of the table. When you click an image in Edit mode, its display size and its actual size are optionally displayed below the image. Without any extra graphic work, the Library lets you take advantage of new themes, smart clip arts, flash buttons, e-card templates, and so on, all created by graphic designers. You can get more themes and resources through the internet.
With the Smart ClipArt editor, you can easily create your own banners and buttons and then transform them into images.
Namo Capture lets you capture the contents of windows, menus, screens, and so on, from anything you can display on your computer, in GIF or BMP format.
Namo Image Slicer lets you actually "slice" bitmap images into smaller pieces for faster loading in browsers. Namo Image Slicer 1.5 exports sliced images straight to HTML, so you can easily insert them into your Web pages. It also converts Adobe Photoshop(PSD) files to GIF, JPG, or PNG format.
Namo GIF Animator let you easily create animated GIF images from your own still images.
To help you compare your own Web design tools with the Namo WebEditor Suite 2006, we've listed several WebEditor features below that are not always found in competing software. Document features
Advanced features
Site Management features
As you can see, Namo WebEditor Suite 2006 is a great bang for the buck. . Whether you are a beginner, or an experienced Web designer, Namo WebEditor Suite 2006 belongs in your toolbox for creating Web sites. We know of no other program that offers such a myriad of features and bonus tools for Web development that sells for such a reasonable price. Hats off to everyone involved in this product.
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