Magix Website Maker 5 review

Since the final result is rendered in Flash, Magix Website Maker 5 also offers fewer sophisticated web features — image galleries, embedded media players and guestbooks are available, but site search tools, RSS feeds and forums are not. This simplicity also extends to sites’ composition and only flat structures with no nested pages are possible. This does simplify things for novice users and, if you drop a navigation bar into the page, the application will update it automatically as new pages are added and existing ones renamed.

The main Flash-based interface shows every editable element into a list on the left, with drag-and-drop page features running along the bottom

As with Serif WebPlus X5, however, beginners will get the most polished results from Magix Website Maker 5 by using one of the templates. These are grouped into categories (business, vacation, and so on) and although their colour schemes can’t be edited, each does come with a number of different layouts to suit different page purposes — so there’s no need to shoehorn a contact form into an ‘About us’ layout yourself. The application also offers Wizard-based content creation as part of this template set-up, where each page can be populated with text, images and other media using a simple, step-by-step interface, rather than the busier main design window.

When it comes to publishing a site, Website Maker 5 is tied to hosting provided by Magix — third-party hosting is not supported. This will obviously be a limitation for some, but the major benefit is that publishing a site involves nothing more than clicking a button, and there’s no mention of FTP servers or other web jargon in sight. For £5 a month you get a domain (.com, .net, .biz, .org etc) 10GB of web space and Google AdSense support – around £1 a month more than WebPlus.net, but you do get more space for your Flash content.

In short, anyone looking to develop their coding skills, get to grips with Flash or just develop general purpose web sites is going to be very disappointed with Magix Website Maker 5, but young kids with school projects to work on, the clueless-about-computers and anyone who just wants to get information online with the minimum of fuss will appreciate its dumbed-down (and not necessarily in a bad way) approach.