Review: Homepage Maker 6 Ultimate design software

Homepage Maker 6 Ultimate bills itself as a business website maker that's easy for home users too.

While it's certainly powerful enough for many small businesses, we reckon home users, unless they're very technically minded, will be left behind by the sheer amount of knowledge needed to use the program.

All the action takes place in your browser – the program sets up a server on your computer and you edit the site using that, then when you're ready to put it online it uploads the whole thing. That's a complicated way of doing things but it has its advantages – it makes it much easier to make a site that changes often, for instance.

However, it made it hard to get going – you have to know about such complicated things as the professional database language SQL, for a start. There are good points – the editor is excellent, and is much better than most at letting you see exactly what the site will look like. There are plenty of templates that make it very easy to get going, and by and large they look good.

But the difficulty level, and the fact that some of the options haven't been translated from the original German, makes this product hard to recommend for anyone other than web experts, who might find it too limiting.

Vista compatible: Yes