EZGenerator 4: website-creation software

EZGenerator began life as a private tool used by software firm Image Line to create a website for its own music software. The company found it so impressive that it was turned into a commercial product for making home and small business websites.

All EZGenerator sites are created in the same way: start the New Project wizard, pick a visual style from one of the 255 templates (each one has a range of styles and colours) and then select the kind of site (personal, business, mainly pictures, music, shop and so on).

The next step is to choose which pages EZGenerator should create automatically (perhaps a biography, links, calendar or photo blog) and then choose a layout for each one. After that, there's a bit of housekeeping to be done such as setting the browser title and a Google-friendly site description, before EZGenerator goes off and builds the site, filling it with ‘dummy' text and pictures that can be replaced with your own.

There's no doubt that EZGenerator teems with good-looking features, including all the usual stuff such as hyperlinks, tables, sidebars, and picture slideshows, which are fancy and include nice lightbox effects and pan and zooms. It also has widgets that make it easy to add social networking bookmarks, Youtube videos, podcasts, forms, nifty polls, a clever randomizer that cycles through different items each time the page is loaded, drop down menus, rollovers, and banners. It will also generate site maps, has the ability to add RSS feeds and has support for Google Maps and Google Adsense. If you're making a shop it supports Paypal, Worldpay and Google Checkout.

Unfortunately, too much of the interface and the way the program works was opaque – EZGenerator badly needs a straightforward do-this-then-do-that tutorial. We found that lots of things weren't clear including how to actually position new objects on the page, or whether it was possible to add a shop to a personal web site (we think it isn't).

EZGenerator is a very powerful program with loads of features, but beginners or occasional users will struggle to get to grips with it.