Today there are several web authoring tools available to developers, and it can be an extremely difficult task to choose the right one for your needs. In this article Tim reviews Namo WebEditor 5: a fully-featured IDE for creating web pages quickly and easily. He talks about its IDE, the features that he found most useful from the application, as well as WebEditor 5's pro's and con's.
Review: Namo WebEditor 5 - WebEditor 5 in review (Page 2 of 4 )
One of the first things that I noticed when I started to use WebEditor 5 is its similarity to popular word processing applications such as Microsoft Office 2000 and Star Office. It's menu layout is very intuitive, and Namo have taken the common approach to menu navigation: Popup menus across the top, followed by a set of HTML tag/table related icons, font drop-down lists, etc directly under the menus. Here's what the WebEditor 5 IDE looks like:
Style Sheets
WebEditor 5's support for standard HTML tags such as line breaks, tables, fonts, forms, images, paragraphs, frames, etc is excellent, and it's simple to insert any of these tags into your web pages. One of my favorite features of WebEditor 5 is its support for cascading style sheets. WebEditor's style sheet manager is very intuitive and is one of the best implementations of style sheets I've ever seen in an IDE. It looks like this:
Script Wizard
If you don't have much experience with JavaScript, then WebEditor 5 may be just the IDE that you need. It includes an interactive JavaScript wizard that comes pre-installed with several handy JavaScript functions that allow you to add menus and navigation, special effects, scrollers, image effects, links, buttons and handy utilities to your web pages. My favorite script is the slide-in layer script, which allows you to define a layer and have that layer scroll in and out of a certain position on the screen. The script wizard looks like this:
Built-In Image Effects Editor
One of the most annoying features of some web page editors is that they don't include built-in image manipulation support. Fortunately, WebEditor 5 includes a set of extremely useful buttons that we can use to manipulate images dynamically. To use the image effects editor, we simply right-click on an image and choose the image effects menu option. Here's what the image effects dialog looks like:
The buttons along the top of the image effects dialog are extremely helpful and give us the ability to lighten or darken an image, increase or decrease the contrast of an image, sharpen or blur an image, rotate an image, bevel an image, etc.
I used WebEditor 5 to mock-up a web site for a client of mine, and I would normally use an external image-editing program to clip and scale my images before I referenced them from HTML pages. For 80% of the images I used, I didn't even need an external image-editing program to modify them, and I used WebEditor 5's built-in image effects editor quite effectively to accomplish the same tasks. It was a great time saver.
Themes Manager
If you didn't already know, I have a hobby of creating data-driven web sites for my local community groups whenever I can. I feel that these sites add value to my portfolio and also put my name and company into the public eye. 90% of the time these sites are simply 5-pages in length and can be created in a day or two.
WebEditor 5's themes manager comes with several different site themes that can be used to spruce up any web site with just the click of a button. WebEditor 5 includes over 50 unique yet professional themes, ranging in styles from arts to business to culture to science.
One thing that I noticed with WebEditor 5's themes manager is that you can load it once, but apply the selected theme to every open document. This is great if you're styling more than one site at a time. The themes manager looks like this:
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