Product Description

WebPlus X2 makes it quick and painless to produce professional-looking sites featuring interactive forums and blogs, polished animated photo galleries, podcasts and cool YouTube videos, Flash animations, secure password-protected pages, easy e-commerce sites with partners including PayPal, and much more, with handy on-screen help to guide you every step of the way.

Whether a novice or a seasoned designer, a hobbyist or commercial manager, WebPlus has something to offer everyone, resulting in amazing websites without the headaches - and without breaking the bank.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1057 in Software
• Brand: Serif
• Model: WPX2USREVMBRT
• Released on: 2009-09-20
• Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .85 pounds

Features

• WebPlus X2 is Serif's outstanding Vista certified web design marvel. Award-winning, versatile, powerful and easy-to-use, it is perfect for making engaging, professional-looking sites.
• With smart web gadgets, integrated e-commerce with partners including PayPal, support for YouTube, podcasts and Flash content, plus easy design and on-screen help, WebPlus X2 is ideal for any business or organization looking to create its own website.
• Don't be daunted by designing a site--with 30 professionally-designed templates to choose from, there's plenty to inspire you or help achieve speedy results.
• WebPlus X2 provides an easy approach to web design, with integrated e-commerce wizards, support for engaging YouTube content, podcasts and Flash animations--and all with no need to learn HTML.
• Serif's online web resource not only offers new visitor analytics to give you detailed information about the usage of your site, we've also improved search engine optimisation for WebPlus X2 so your site can rank higher with services like Google.

Amazon.com
WebPlus X2 is Serif's outstanding Vista certified web design solution, packed with everything an organization needs to design fully-featured and professional-looking sites--with no need to learn or program any HTML! With smart Web gadgets including forums and site search hosted for free by Serif, integrated e-commerce with partners including PayPal, support for engaging YouTube, podcast and RSS content, plus video and Shockwave Flash animations, WebPlus X2 is the perfect answer for in-house web design. WebPlus helps at every stage, whether starting with a professional business template, designing from scratch, automatically fixing design issues, or publishing to the Web, it's never been easier to achieve fantastic results, fast.

The all-in-one solution for professional quality web design. Click to enlarge.

Get your inspiration from a wide range of customizable professional templates. Click to enlarge.

Easily set up a secure online store at the touch of a button. Click to enlarge.

Embed your favorite YouTube clips, podcasts and vidcasts for the ultimate interactivity. Click to enlarge.

The All-in-One Solution for Professional Quality Web Design.

Fast web design for all
Fantastic Web design with no need to learn HTML! WebPlus gives you complete control in a DTP-style design interface with easy layout capabilities.

Customizable professional templates
Don't be daunted by designing a site--with professionally-produced templates to choose from, there's plenty to inspire you or help achieve speedy results.

In-house graphic design
Add design pizzazz with great Web graphics--everything from instant shapes to attractive fills, transparencies and special effects, plus 3D artwork, warping and image adjustments.

Sell! Sell! Sell!
Add fully-featured e-commerce carts and buttons using well-known partners PayPal, Mal's and RomanCart. A wizard makes the task easy and safe--no fuss, complication, or setup cost!

Interest your viewers
Entice and engage visitors with amazing and unrivalled interactive Web gadgets including forums, blogs, mailing lists, live surveys and polls, feedback forms, site search, active hit counters and even messaging with shoutboxes.

Show off your favorite media
Make sites even more interactive with exciting podcasts and vidcasts, giving them the power subscribe to updates using iTunes. Also embed YouTube videos straight in your site!

Safe surfing
Secure areas of your site with user logins, password-protected pages--and CAPTCHA signup security to stop unwanted automatons from invading and harvesting details.

Optimize your site
Easily preview, publish and maintain your WebPlus site, now with enhanced search engine optimization and visitor analytics to help you get the best from your site online.

Bonus: 12 months of free web hosting and sub domains

Getting your site online is hassle-free, thanks to 12 months of free web hosting included with every purchase of WebPlus X2. With WebPlus X2 you get a full professional hosting package, including:

• 10 GB web space
• 100 GB per month bandwidth
• 100 unique email addresses
• Host up to 16 separate websites
• 24/7 customer support

Customer Reviews

Nice!
Web X2 is a little counter intuitive at first. Then again, isn't any bit of new software? Once you figure it out, it is a breeze to use. People keep telling me how professional my site looks. I have even started to build sites for other businesses. People are asking me to do web development more than my real business! I never expected that. [...]. My next big adventure will be using the Flash tools. Web X2 builds a great site for a fraction of the cost of other design tools. I am very happy.

Doesn't support external CSS
I really wanted to like this product, as in the past I've used PagePlus (long ago, when Serif was in Nashua, NH) and thought it was great value for the money.

Unfortunately, WebPlus X2 was a disappointment. I design professionally, and planned to use WPX2's touted eCommerce features with my existing sites. In HTML editors like Dreamweaver, one can open HTML pages in the program and see a reasonable WYSIWYG graphic representation of what the page will look like. With WPX2, you must import the page, and if you have used external CSS, you will NOT see what you designed.

Here's the problem: WPX2 does not recognize external style sheets--a major drawback for any serious designer, because external CSS is widely regarded as best practice. When you import that HTML page, all you see is a stack of disordered content. What this means is that you must design your site in WPX2, or restrict yourself to using table code and/or internal CSS if you want to see your design displayed properly in the editor.

It's all the more absurd, because Serif's own website is using external style sheets.

I contacted Serif tech support, trying to find out whether maybe I'd missed something. So far, no response.

The sad thing is that the program otherwise has a lot of nice features, and perhaps if I were a novice, it would be fine for my needs. The tools seem easy to read, and there are palettes galore. I'll hopefully be able to generate code for eCommerce and password sign-in features, and add it to my existing sites manually. But it would be much easier to open/import pages in WPX2 and work directly on them there.

Message to Serif: SUPPORT EXTERNAL STYLE SHEETS!

A powerful, if eccentric, bargain
WebPlus X2 is an amazingly powerful, if eccentric, site-building program, and an incredible bargain at Amazon's current price.

I've been using it for a few weeks now, and I'm constantly being pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and the depth of the options. The individual features are way too elaborate to address here; one can download a full manual from Serif's site to get a sense of the full scope of the program.

If you're a raw beginner, prepare to put in a lot of work before you can take full advantage of the software. But if you give it time, you'll be rewarded. The combination of the enclosed printed manual and the help files are very well-produced, and don't make any unwarranted assumptions about the skill levels of the user.

About that eccentricity: An important thing to understand about WebPlus is that in many respects it's more like a desktop publishing program than a traditional WYSIWYG web page creation program. You specify a page width and depth, and build within that canvas. It relies on a lot of absolute positioning of graphic elements, which means you need to make a good assumption about the screen resolution and and browser window size your viewers will be using. And there are a lot of type effects inherited from the program's cousin, PagePlus, which result in creation of graphics files that are placed within the page. Attractive, but at the price of compatibility with web standards. (I've been using different incarnations of PagePlus for years, so I started out being familiar with Serif's tools and tactics.)

The skilled web programmers who offered rotten reviews, comparing with the likes of Dreamweaver, are missing the point. Dreamweaver (which I've used) is a muscle program that costs about 10 times what you'd pay for WebPlus. Different products, different markets.

I was surprised and delighted when I opened the package from Amazon and found not just a program CD and a jam-packed resource CD, but also a printed manual and two template packages, one with sample business sites and the other for home and hobby use. Those last three items are a la carte products elsewhere. Also, there's a thriving user forum that offers great tips and quick advice.

This latest incarnation of WebPlus was marketed strongly on the abundance of Smart Objects, which rely on a Serif host server to make response forms, forums, blogs, analytics tools, etc., a drag and drop process, rather than items that require scripting on a full hosting service. Giving credit, these are free with the software, with only modest limits on total data volume (you can buy extra). But in the past few weeks that server has been plagued with large chunks of downtime, which can cause a whole site to hang. The user community has been up in arms, and Serif recently responded that the problems came in their expansion to a bank of multiple servers, and said they believe the worst is over. The service has been stable for several days, but I'd say the jury is still out on whether these tools are reliable in a commercial setting.

Bottom line: If you're starting out with a modest understanding of computers and the web, you should be able to use WebPlus X2 and its templates to produce professional-looking sites rapidly, at invitingly low cost.