Serif WebPlus X6 review

Serif WebPlus X5 was our favourite user-friendly web creation tool of last year and beyond a need for some more up to date templates there wasn’t much we felt was missing. Perhaps Serif feels the same, because the new WebPlus X6 is more of a nip and tuck than radical overhaul, although that will probably please anyone accustomed to the familiar interface that’s shared with the application’s siblings.

WebPlus X6 comes with a wide selection of templates that have multiple colour schemes

As with earlier versions of the application, anyone who doesn’t want to use one of the site templates in WebPlus X6 can create a site from scratch, but blank site creation has been improved. A new Wizard requests elementary information about the planned site, such as the name, page width, colour scheme et cetera, to help novice designers. This then creates a bespoke template that makes it much easier to maintain a consistent design as the site is assembled. The fundamental process of building a web page in WebPlus X6 has changed little from the previous version, and it follows the familiar process of placing the text and image frames that hold most of the web content.

Adding more sophisticated content is equally straightforward, and anything from a navigation bar to a photo gallery can be created by dragging the appropriate icon from the ‘QuickBuild’ bar at the left of the main window. Many more assets are available here than in WebPlus X5, and many existing options are also much easier to manage. Rollovers, for example, can now trigger a number of actions, including changing object opacity and adjusting Z-Index order, which is used to bring an object in an overlapping stack to the front of a page.

Page creation is a simple matter of dragging and dropping objects onto the page

Also new is drag-and-drop for embedding Google Maps and content for a range of social media services, both of which are easier to deploy than the chunks of HTML required in WebPlus X5. Content can be shared with Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and there are share buttons for Delicious, Digg, Reddit and a few other social bookmarking sites. WebPlus X6 also adds the long overdue ability to see a site’s structure as a WYSIWYG layout that can be dragged and dropped to rejig its hierarchy. X5 was stuck with a text list in a tiny dialog box.