This could be a frustrating package for anyone who really knows what they are doing, but a very good buy for somebody who doesn’t know any HTML, doesn’t really want to, and wants or needs to get a web site up and running quickly.

At first the indications were not good.  The installation was a little bit quirky, and early on in the process I spotted a few typos and mis-translations.  Nothing serious, but enough to make it apparent that this was written in German and then translated.  Mind you I have used serious expensive applications at work that have been translated much less well.  After a little bit of confusion about how to activate/registerthe program it all went smoothly and I was soon able to start using it.

The program itself opens in a fairly small window which is not re-sizable, which is not something I am used to.  Actually it does make some sense as this is not really a program like Frontpage or Dreamweaver where you design a website.  It is really more like a wizard where you choose from various options, although there are quite a lot of options.

This is supposed to be a product that lets you create websites without any knowledge of HTML so I tried to forget that I do know some HTML which was difficult at first.

The concept of this program is that you work through five steps to create a web site.

Step one is the basics: the name of the site, contact email address, basic layout and choice of templates. There are quite a few templates but they all look fairly similar. All of the designs are based on there being a banner across the top and buttons for pages being either across the top or down the left-hand side.

Step two is to define the structure: the structure is that there is a home page with further levels of detail, all in a tree layout.  I was rushing through so I just created a handful of pages and sub-pages at random, coming back to rename them later.

Step three is the main part: defining the pages themselves.  This works in a WYSIWYG fashion.  Each page comes up as a grid.  You can add new rows and columns to the grid and then drag & drop elements into the cells.  Elements could be text, images, animations, tables, videos, etc. and can either be dropped into a single cell or spread across rows or columns. After placing elements you open them to insert the details of them.

Step four is advanced settings: you can just skip this or do some tweaking of things like how the buttons and scrollbars look and also add information for a rudimentary e-commerce cart.

Step five is to upload to the Internet: obviously you need to have some webspace to upload everything to – either some sort of hosting arrangement or just the free personal webspace that comes with most broadband packages – and you need to know the ftp details (account, username, password)

I whipped through all this fairly quickly to get an idea of how it works, then went back through to populate the pages a bit more.  Although the program works in a very linear way you can go back to previous stages at any time to make changes. After about an hour of playing around I had a website all uploaded (www.circuitcity.co.uk).  Not the best website in the world, but it looks like it took a lot more than an hour to do.

As I do have some experience with HTML and more flexible (and expensive) packages I probably will not use this much for my own sites, but I would happily recommend this to anybody who just wants a website and does not want to spend a lot of cash on software.  Something like Frontpage can do a lot more, but it can also be daunting. This is quite friendly and easy, and the linear nature of it means that a relative novice can proceed in an orderly fashion.

I think this would be ideal for anybody who is not sure whether they need a website, or for somebody who just wants to get something online without the trouble of learning any HTML. I may continue to use it for one of my ’spare’ websites just to play around with.

There are plenty of limitations, but really what do you expect for this price?  It represents good value for money in the market it is aimed at.  It may not appeal to professionals, but I don’t think they are the target market for this.  I do know a couple of people for whom this package will be ideal and I’m going to be recommending it to them to get me out of managing their sites for them!

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the results and I have only really scratched the surface of the features.  Not only that, I just ploughed ahead without looking at any of the online help that is available. Although there are limitations I have not reached them yet.

It is very easy for somebody who has some skills or knowledge of HTML, even as limited as mine, or somebody used to using well-known web-creation software to look down on a simple little piece of software like this, but actually it is quite good for what it is, and for the price.

A valid criticism is that it it limited in what it can do but what it does do it does well.  And it seems to be suitable for the sort of limited-facility webspaces that come with most broadband accounts as there is no reliance on ph, MySQL or anything like that: its all just HTML and some scripting.

I may recommend it to the Broadfield community centre.  Its so cheap I might even buy them a copy as a charitable donation.  Their web site has not been touched for a couple of years.  The problem is that, although it is a simple site, it is all done in plain HTML.  I used to keep it up-to-date, editing everything in Notepad but it can get a little fiddly, and I am a bit out of touch with what is going on there.

I always intended to show the staff there how to do it themselves, but that would mean teaching them HTML and how to use ftp packages.  WebSite X5 would, I think, be easy enough for them to use themselves and the current layout of the site would lend itself very well to the format of the templates.

In fact I would happily recommend it to anyone who wants to set up and manage a simple site for a club or small organisation, or even for personal use, where they are more interested in the content than in learning much about how the web works.

The recent upgrade to Wordpress 2.6 meant that I had to do some changes anyway, and while I was at it I downloaded a slightly newer version on the Cutline theme.  I had done all sorts of customisation to the theme and to a few of the core Wordpress php modules so I had to re-do all of them, and I figured I that I would take advantage of that momentum to try and do a few of the things I couldn’t work out how to do before.

All of which reminds me of a theory of mine.

Like many of my theories it doesn’t bear close examination.  In fact many of my theories are inferior to the  Theory of Dinosaurs by Anne Elk (Miss) but that doesn’t stop me.  The theory is that there is a tendency towards a correlation between the technical quality of a singer’s voice and their lack of anything to say with it.  In other words, the singers who have something of substance they want to say tend to not have the greatest voices.   All those singers with pure voices who can hit notes spot on just sing whatever someone else writes, which is normally trivial – while singers with opinions who write their own stuff have the most unconventional voices: Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Ian Dury, Billy Bragg, Johnny Rotten, Jarvis Cocker, David Byrne, Rachid Taha.

Anyway, before letting anyone have time to spot the many flaws in that theory, I think it applies a bit to blogs too.  The more I have been delving into the code of cascading style sheets, templates and php modules, the less inclined I have been to actually write anything.  It appears that I can’t concentrate on form and content at the same time.

For the record – and for my reference so I can have a checklist the next time I do an upgrade and need to remember all the bits I tweaked – the main changes were:

• Replacing the masthead text with an image
  My favourite change.  I reckon it looks much classier.
• Making several alternative images which appear randomly
  I always wanted to have a random tagline plugin but could never find one.  Re-using the header image code and having a set of alternative masthead images gives the same effect.
• Putting a title on the search box widget
  A bit of a bugger as this is in the core WP code but needs variables defined in the theme templates.
• Putting a title on the Links widget
  Doing that gave me the confidence to have a crack at the search box title
• Fixing the problem on the Recent Comments plugin widget so I can use that instead of Wordpress’s built-in one.
  Temporary fix only.  It turns out that the bug in it can be worked around by turning the caching for the widget off, loading a pageand turning it back on again. Really glad about it though – I much prefer the plugin over the built-in one because it shows the start of the comment text.
• Putting a tiny bit of colour in the sidebar titles
  I hope its subtle enough to not detract from the overall purity of the design.
• Sorting out the alignment of the left sidebar
  Never noticed it before, but the left sidebar had left padding.  Justhad to change that to right padding and then change the body from having left padding to equal amounts of left and right.
• Changed the style of blockquotes
  Trivial, but this time I actually used the custom.css style sheet so if I upgrade to a later version of Cutline in the future it will keep that change.
• Fixed the problem with photo captions so they work in posts, and so that the alignment works OK.
  Harder than it should have been because the feature was added after the theme was written so the styles didn’t exist in it.  Had to whip bits from the default theme’s css to put into the theme’s css

Apart from that, I tweaked the style in the random quote widget a tad, andhad to re-do all my customisations to the header, footer, comment form, and main page templates. At the end of it I am unreasonably pleased with the results, and too busy admiring the end product to write anything.  Perhaps not to everybody’s taste, but I like it and that’s the main thing.

All very timely though – I was starting to forget what little I had learned empirically about php, html and css syntax.

For a start, while I was not looking, the hit counter ticked past the momentous but arbitrary 100,000 hits mark.  I’m still not sure exactly what Statcounter is measuring, but whatever it is it got into 6 figures this evening.

More important than that, I think I have finished playing around at last.  I have decided to stop tinkering with the layout, stop adding new photos to the pool of random header images, and stop adding more plugins.  I have also finished ploughing through all the old uncategorised posts and putting them into categories.

Just a word on the random header images though: some of them feature faces of people who might sometimes visit (Damian, Andrew R, Antonia, Spizz, Chrystal, RWS, Tony Blair – well you never know, and a few others).  The pictures do come up randomly but eventually, if you come back enough you might see yourself.  The first person to do so wins a virtual round of applause.

It works for me, because I am logged in and don’t get the anti-spam word captcha thing, but everyone else gets a 404 error. Unless they are logged in too – but who wants to go to all the trouble of creating an account and everything?

I’ll get to the bottom of it eventually. I did a couple of things to reduce spam, like renaming the wp-comment-post.php file. Maybe when I edited all the other php files to change references to it I missed one out.

If I can’t get to the bottom of it I will just have to de-activate the anti-spam word captcha thingy, but that reeks of admitting defeat so it will be a last resort.

They didn’t make as much of a song and dance about it as the Guardian did, nor has the reading public been making as much fuss about it.

It all looks pretty good to me. The size is much easier to handle and the layout is a lot clearer. It now feels a lot more like a ‘Sunday Guardian’ than before. I can’t understand how the paper seems less bulky than before but at the same time seems to have more in it. Usually the main paper is very light on content, but today it felt more substantial.

The G2-sized television supplement is handy but best of all was finding out on page 2 of the main paper that there is a new African Soul Rebels tour!

The new Observer suffers from the same problem as the old one though – the shops in Broadfield only stock a couple of copies. If you don’t get there early you have to start hunting around town for it.

Now I only have to worry about how far down the page they want to put the title. Have you seen it? There must be about 20% of the page above the title.

She has a link to PDF of a trial edition’s front page.

Like many people, I have some reservations about having headlines in a serif font, but then I am very old-fashioned and traditional about such things – body in serif, heading in sans. I don’t mind the new font when it is used for the body though, except for one thing: the lower case i has its dot offset a little to the right. Its a bit of an annoyance.

Having said that, we will probably get used to it quickly and before long will even grow attached to it. The whole thing is a bold move for a paper with such a large proportion of its readership being interested in design.

I’m not so sure about the size though, and not for the sort of snobbish reasons that led some lifelong readers of the Times to abandon the paper rather than be seen reading a tabloid. I am just not sure it is small enough.

But I am looking at it from the specific and narrow perspective of a regular railway communter. I never read the Guardian on the train, preferring to nap, but I do sometimes find myself having to fight for space with acres of newsprint belonging to people who do not have the mental capacity to keep themselves amused/engaged/occupied without reading, even on the short stand-up sardine journey between Clapham Junction and Waterloo.

I think I would prefer all broadsheets to reduce to tabloid size. I would have that enforced by the same law which banned umbrellas and forced the un-invention of mobile phones.