By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
According to Corel, "Corel WebMaster Suite offers a complete solution for creating web sites." My assessment of this is that they are close with this statement, but the suite of programs could use some improvements in the area of HTML editing and site management.
Why, for example does the HTML editing component of Web.Designer not have a replace feature? That said, Corel’s HTML editor is a bit better than Microsoft FrontPage’s HTML editing component of its FrontPage Editor. In this price range, Corel’s competition is Microsoft FrontPage. Which program you buy will depend on what graphic programs you already own, where you plan on posting your web site, and how much you want to pay. I will come back to this later, and next month I hope to have a review of FrontPage 98.
There are really three different groups of programs in the suite. The first group, and most important, consists of the WEB.DESIGNER program, which is a "what you see is what you get" type of HTML editing program, and the WEB.SiteManager program, which is sort of like Windows Explorer for web sites. The second group of programs is comprised of the ones that assist you in creating graphics for the web: WEB.PhotoPaint and WEB.DRAW. These are scaled down versions of Corel PhotoPaint and CorelDraw especially adapted for web graphics. WEB.GALLERY organizes these graphics. The third group is what are called accessories--sort of like freebies--things you are glad to have but which are not very important to creating your web site. This group consists of the last three programs in the list below. By the way, these last three programs, along with the two graphics programs, are 16 bit programs; the two main programs are 32 bit. Since they licensed WEB.WORLD, I understand why it is 16 bit, but why WEB.DRAW is 16 bit is beyond me.
In sum, we have included in the Corel's WebMaster Suite:
Also included are OReilly's WebSite 1.1 server software (allowing you to run a web site from your computer), Netscape Navigator 3.0 (somewhat outdated), 7500 clipart images (nice collection of Internet ready images instead of Desktop Publishing images), and a free 30-day web site hosting offer (from MicroCrafts web hosting service). The price for all of this is $199.99. To see what Corel has to say or to place an order you may go to http://www.corel.com/corelweb/webmaster/.
You use WEB.DESIGNER to create the individual pages for your site. It has all the usual tools for point and click creation of links, tables, and pages with frames, to mention just a few items. To create or polish the graphics you will be inserting in these pages you can use WEB.DRAW or WEB.PhotoPaint. And, to me, these two programs are the strong selling points of the suite if you don't already have good quality graphics programs. Microsoft FrontPage is equally good at creating web pages with their FrontPage Editor; they have, I think, a slightly better "SiteManager" component in FrontPage Explorer than does Corel, and they include Microsoft Image Composer to manipulate graphics for the web. But the inclusion of WEB.PhotoPaint and WEB.DRAW, I think, make up for this difference. I must confess that I really have not looked closely at these two "light" graphics programs since I have CorelDraw and Corel PhotoPaint on my computer.
Thus, if you are not going to be hosting your web site at a provider that supports (and charges for) Microsoft FrontPage Extensions, which allow for increased functionality like the Discussion Group or Site Search at our group's web site, then going with Corel's WebMaster Suite possibly makes sense--except that it goes for $199 versus FrontPage's $149. However, with WebMaster you also get the accessory programs.
The accessory program WEB.DATA turns your Database tables into web documents--something that the newer versions of database programs like Microsoft Access 97 also do. But if you don't have one of these newer versions, then this program may be of use to you. The most interesting of the accessory programs to me was WEB.WORLD, which is really an earlier version of the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) program, Cosmo HomeSpace Designer. I enjoyed using it to create a virtual reality tour of our Museum of Science and Industry meeting site, which you can view by taking the "TPCUG Virtual Reality" link on our main page. You will have to have a VRML plug-in installed to be able to view this with your browser (something that can be downloaded for free). Sometime, when I have time, I want to redo it to make it more accurate now that I have studied the layout of MOSI.
To see what you can do with WEB.MOVE take the "Animated Movie of our last Meeting" link on our main page. It is not a real movie, just a background with three separate animations that appear and disappear on a schedule. Cute--but of what value I am not sure.
Once you have created the pages for your web site, you then upload them to the Internet using either Corel WEB.DESIGNER's Instant Publishing Wizard or the standard File Transfer Protocol (FTP). All of this is explained very well in the online help or the printed manual.
After you have published your site, you can then maintain it and view its organization with WEB.SiteManager. The graphic accompanying this article is a small portion of the SiteManager's page view of a small portion of our TPCUG web site. You can have SiteManager check the site for broken links, having it list them and the pages on which they reside. This is very useful in keeping a site current, since links to external URLs will be dying on you all the time--hopefully this is not the case for internal links. On our "Editor's choice of useful WWW links" alone there are over 400 external links that should be checked for currency regularly. A feature like this makes the process easy.
Of course, as with all programs now, there is a wizard that will guide you through the process of creating a web site with designs you can use if you are short on imagination at the moment.
I bought the program because Corel gave members of our group good pricing on it, and I hope to use some of the graphics features it has that Microsoft FrontPage doesn’t. However, since I have access to a site with Microsoft FrontPage Extensions and since this gives me Discussion Groups, site searches, hit counters, and very easy uploading, I will stay with FrontPage for maintaining the User Group site at http://www.canx.com/tpcug/ . But I sometimes use Corel WEB.DESIGNER to create pages (I prefer its HTML editor to FrontPage Editor’s), and I am interested in Corel’s new Barista technology which allows you to make web pages employing Java to remove the limitations imposed by HTML while offering rich formatting options, advanced layout control, and improved graphics display.
The idea behind Barista is to create your fancy graphic in WEB.DRAW, "publish" it using Barista (you don’t have to know Java, the program does the work), and everyone then enjoys a web page with much richer graphics and layout than is possible with HTML. What you see on your web page is really the results of a Java applet. Sounds good doesn’t it?
I just had to try this out, so I cranked up CorelDraw (no need to use WEB.DRAW when you have the real thing), created a simple graphical document, then used the Barista option to create a package of files (mostly Java Class files). To test this, you open the one HTML file that starts everything with your browser. This cranks up a Java applet that after a bit of a wait displays your graphic. Corel warns that this process can be quite slow over the Internet and is more appropriately used on Intranets until Java is tweaked so as to run faster.
Of course, an alternate method of getting a Corel Draw document on the web is to save it as a GIF or JPG graphic which work well on HTML pages. I did this too and then compared the results. The Barista version was much truer to the colors of the original Draw document. However, the Barista version did not print properly from the browser, and the GIF version did. The Barista version also requires about 500 K of additional storage for all the Java class files (this is a one time thing, though, since additional Barista graphics can use the same Java class files).
So I was in a bit of a quandary as to exactly what Barista will do for me. I put a query concerning this on the CorelDraw newsgroup. Here are two answers I got:
From these two answers and my experience, I gather that perhaps Barista’s time has not yet come. But since this is a very, very small part of the WebMaster Suite, don’t let it have any influence on a decision to buy or not to buy. You should study other reviews (which you can probably easily find on the WWW) of the suite and its competitors, consider the price, then make your decision. You might even decide that you can get along fine with one of the free web page creating (but not site managing) programs.
If you would like to read Usenet newsgroup messages concerning the WebMaster Suite and other Corel products, you may need to get them from the Corel newsgroup server CNEWS.COREL.COM instead of your IP’s newsgroup server. That is what I have to do since NetCom does not carry them.
For those who don’t follow any newsgroups, but who want to better understand an operating system or program they use a lot, I strongly recommend that you start following a newsgroup covering these topics. It is easy, since most mail readers also function as newsgroup readers. u