Editor’s Note: This product has been removed from viewing as part of this site because it has been replaced by another product. You can still read our original review below, but TopTenREVIEWS is no longer updating this product’s information.
Talented people often shy away from creating a website because the prospect is just too intimidating. HTML, PHP, JavaScript and other obscure terms scare off would be web designers. Visual Site Designer takes the frustration of hard coding out of web design with a truly WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. For users with coding experience, our TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner for web design software also lets you get your hands dirty with its feature-loaded HTML editor. Whether you’ve dabbled in code or are building a site for the first time, Visual Site Designer is a versatile tool ideal for creating a professional quality website on a budget.
With Visual Site Designer, you can create a sleek website without poring over a thick HTML manual. This program's visual editor is straightforward and will be immediately familiar to users that have used photo editing or desktop publishing software before.
Visual Site Designer organizes pages effectively. You save files according to the pages title along with a designation that serves for organizational purposes. This makes it easy to label and keep track of various pages as you create links and cross links. By naming pages deliberately, we had no problem keeping tabs on multiple projects simultaneously.
We were impressed with this program because it includes a visual design element and an HTML editor in the same program. Web Easy 7 Pro, for example, overcomplicates direct code editing. This program allows you to see code changes in real time. For newcomers to HTML, the program serves as HTML “training wheels”—providing a chance to try new things and immediately see the result.
Visual Site Designer’s allure comes largely from its intuitive visual site designer. The WYSIWYG feature provides a simple means of making great looking sites without any of the guess work involved in hard coding.
The included images and page layout options provide a solid starting point for building a website from scratch. Adding a photo to a page requires a simple click of “add image” and it can be resized and removed with a drag and drop swipe of the mouse.
This program provides site templates with Visual Site Designer. There are a wealth of user created templates available on the net as well. We were impressed with the templates and found them to be a great reference tool as we toyed around with different site designs. While there are good templates available, Visual Site Designer’s real potential is realized when you build a site from the ground up. The site creation wizard onboard Visual Site Designer ensures that you avoid pitfalls in the initial phases of site design.
Visual Site Designer includes an FTP client so you can upload new pages and changes directly to your website.
The image editor includes a library of graphic files well suited for use as buttons, icons or tabs. We appreciated the inclusion of so many everyday graphics. Finding mundane graphics can be a real time sink when designing a website from scratch.
The visual WYSIWYG element of Visual Site Designer has a lot to offer. So does this program's HTML editor. While entirely possible to bypass coding altogether, we appreciated the enhanced text editor—it features a library of tags and a wide array of useful code snippets you can use to create calendars, visitor counters or other interactive site items.
This program has a small but active community. You can find detailed FAQs and tutorials on their site. They provide email tech support and with a purchase of the program you can get tech support via IM. In the case of a crashed computer or other hard- drive-frying disaster, CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer will allow you to download the program free of charge.
Given the well rounded feature set of Visual Site Designer, it’s one of the best deals to be had in the category of web design software. Other leading programs run as high as four and five hundred dollars. In terms of bang for your buck, Visual Site Designer can’t be beat.
Visual Site Designer’s affordability doubled up with its feature set make awarding the program our #1 spot an easy choice. With easy-to-use WYSIWYG functionality, a competent HTML editor and a library of useful code and images built in, Visual Site Designer is the ideal choice for the newcomer to web design.
