CoffeeCup VisualSite Designer is a WYSIWYG Website Creator and Editor that helps you make Web pages with no experience or HTML knowledge.
Pros: CoffeeCup VisualSite Designer is a WYSIWYG Website Creator and Editor. It helps create multi-page websites very simply. This is as simple as dragging and dropping text pieces and images and arranging them appropriately, until you like what you see. Text can be typed in directly and edited and arranged as required. The whole exercise is at text level and the underlying HTML code is never visible, being handled by the editor directly. Thus the user need not have any feel of HTML code at all.
To make things even simpler there’s a set of 70 odd templates that can be used. Multiple pages of text fields, images, graphics, animations etc. can be created quickly. One could use own images or the set of buttons and background creators available with the editor. VisualSite Designer also has its own image creation tools so that other graphics software are not needed. Effects like glow, shadow, and transparency to the text and images can be added as can be customized mouse over buttons and effects- the buttons and java script required are created by the program.
Preview function lets you view the pages in the browser environment., so that you get to see what exactly would get published. Uploading of the pages to the designated FTP site of the website publisher can be made from inside the application. The user interface is a simple WISYWIG editor organization. It is as simple as any other text editor. It helps placing of images additionally. One could add effects to the images also.
Cons: The video tutorials provided at the website of the publisher are very slow, irritatingly so though it explains things completely. The application provides for static pages and images only. No dynamic pages can be created. Thus creating a website that needs to generate HTML to create dynamic pages, cannot be done with this tool. Some of the other features of any meaningful website, such as working with a database or commercial tools does not appear to be possible.
Overall: For beginners as well as users who do not need anything more than a static page, this application can help create a website fairly quickly. From this limited perspective the application does work well and hence it is rated at 4 stars.
