Macromedia Contribute

Running your own website sounds like a great idea but in practice it can be quite tricky to start from scratch, especially if you're a novice web designer. With Macromedia's Contribute, the process is made a lot easier.

The idea behind the software is to initially get someone who knows how to build a website to create your first few pages and then you use Contribute to update the site, editing pages or adding new ones whenever necessary.

This is a great approach, as you don't have to know anything about how the site was originally created to start putting your own copy up and the experience helps you build confidence in web design.

You may be thinking that there are other applications that achieve a similar goal, such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Adobe's GoLive. But these applications cost more than £350 each and are really aimed at the professional web developer. Contribute is a lot easier to use and only costs £69.

When you start Contribute, there's a tutorial that allows you to practice with a sample website or you can jump straight in and do some work updating your own website. Initially, it looks rather like a conventional web browser, with a toolbar that allows you to navigate to different web pages. In this mode, you can browse the website just as if you were using Internet Explorer. This lets you find the pages that you need to update easily, so you can click on the Edit button and start the update process.

When you switch into editing mode, the program's interface changes and becomes more like that of a simple word processor, with options for formatting text, creating tables and inserting graphics. This lets you edit a web page just as if you were typing a simple document, while Contribute hides all the complexity from you.

Contribute also lets you take an existing web page and turn it into a template. Using this method ensures that a website is created with the same consistent design across all of its pages. If you need to add content to a site, rather than simply update information, there's an option to create new, blank web pages, so you can also use Contribute to design a new website from scratch. It's fairly easy to use when designing individual pages although it lacks the wider range of features of applications such as Dreamweaver or GoLive, but it isn't really designed to compete with these programs.

That's not to say that Contribute is a crude piece of software. It contains some nice features, such as the ability to drag-and-drop Word and Excel documents straight onto a web page so the content of these documents is automatically added to your page. For budding entrepreneurs there's a payment option, which allows you to use the PayPal system to accept credit card payments. You can add a simple 'Buy Now' button to a page, allowing people to instantly buy individual items, or create a 'shopping cart' that contains multiple items.

Features such as these make Contribute a very useful tool. It won't replace big design applications such as its big brother Dreamweaver, but it's an effective complement that allows non-technical users to get involved in web work with minimal effort.

Contact: Macromedia 0800 169 8216
www.macromedia.com/uk