Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #157 in Software
• Brand: Serif
• Released on: 2008-05-23
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP

PC Advisor
Serif WebPlus X2 is a feature-packed website-authoring tool that won't break your budget

Manufacturer's Description
The all-in-one solution for professional quality web design.

WebPlus X2 is Serif's outstanding Vista certified web design solution, packed with everything an organization needs to design fully-featured and professional-looking sites "" with no need to learn or program any HTML! With smart Web gadgets including forums and site search hosted for free by Serif, integrated e-commerce with partners including PayPal, support for engaging YouTube, podcast and RSS content, plus video and Shockwave Flash animations, WebPlus X2 is the perfect answer for in-house web design. WebPlus helps at every stage, whether starting with a professional business template, designing from scratch, automatically fixing design issues, or publishing to the Web, it's never been easier to achieve fantastic results, fast.

Fast web design for all

Fantastic Web design with no need to learn HTML! WebPlus gives you complete control in a DTP-style design interface with easy layout capabilities.

Customizable professional templates

Don't be daunted by designing a site "" with professionally-produced templates to choose from, there's plenty to inspire you or help achieve speedy results.

In-house graphic design

Add design pizzazz with great Web graphics "" everything from instant shapes to attractive fills, transparencies and special effects, plus 3D artwork, warping and image adjustments.

Sell! Sell! Sell!

Add fully-featured e-commerce carts and buttons using well-known partners PayPal, Mal's and RomanCart. A wizard makes the task easy and safe "" no fuss, complication, or setup cost!

Interest your viewers

Entice and engage visitors with amazing and unrivalled interactive Web gadgets including forums, blogs, mailing lists, live surveys and polls, feedback forms, site search, active hit counters and even messaging with shoutboxes.

Show off your favorite media

Make sites even more interactive with exciting podcasts and vidcasts, giving them the power subscribe to updates using iTunes. Also embed YouTube videos straight in your site!

Safe surfing

Secure areas of your site with user logins, password-protected pages "" and CAPTCHA signup security to stop unwanted automatons from invading and harvesting details.

Optimize your site

Easily preview, publish and maintain your WebPlus site, now with enhanced search engine optimization and visitor analytics to help you get the best from your site online.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

As good as it gets for technonopes
Let's face facts: HTML and CSS is beyond a lot of people without professional instruction. I've tried and failed several times and found it incredibly frustrating to learn. I have built a couple of sites on Dreamweaver but stayed well clear of the coding side of things (opting rather to fumble my (more credible) photoshop efforts at menu buttons and what have around you until they vaguely resembled something cool -- only to discover that on a friends browser it had managed to mangle itself up again and look nothing like I intended it too. I'd given up (until now) as Wordpress makes website design easy enough without all the hassle. Then along came this.

I have to admit, I've been surprised and impressed by Webplus X2. I've had a good play and after so much DW agony, it feels a little like I'm cheating with this! It's very versatile; I was expecting something very wizard orientated rather than a proper web 'design' application. It is actually possible to build a proper site using this software and building it is so much easier. Everything seems designed the way you'd expect a web-design program to be (unless you've been instructed, DW is completely baffling to begin with). The package comes with some PDF tutorials and is easy to learn and seems to go a long way (RSS and Paypal).

The bottom line is that this isn't going to build you a professional site, but if you're going to do it yourself and don't know HTML, this is an absolute godsend. You can do almost any sort of personal or small business site with this relatively painlessly (considering the alternatives!).

One last thing. By way or warning, to register this software you have to make a (free) phone call which is just so they can try and sell you an extra £40 worth of resources! (which came down to £20 when I refused!) You have to do this or face having the please register this software box popping up ad infinitum. It isn't much, but is slightly annoying and does cheapen an otherwise professional product.

Difficult to get into, but rewarding in the end. FOUR STARS
I was attracted to the product having read previous reviews here. The product looked promising - I also bought the comprehensive and well printed User Guide and Resource Guide books (the latter seemed a reprint of a lot of the the online Help, but being able to read it away from the PC is handy) and the whole thing seemed slick and professional. BUT:
(1) The registration was a very off-putting experience. (I think another reviewer raised this point also). To get my code I had to talk to a call centre operative who kept stumbling over her lines whilst she pitched another 'special offer' product to me in tones that I felt treated me like an imbecile. Whoever is responsible for such crass marketing needs their head examining in my view. It put me right off from the start.
(2) I'm fairly PC literate but I found the screen more cluttered than any I'd ever seen before. It's taken a few hours of stuggling to find my way around. I found it totally counter intuitive, a massive wilderness of tool bars and buttons, rather than tucking options away in main heading drop down menus, but this may be down to personal preference.
(3) The tutorials in the resource guide didn't relate all the time to what was on the screen, (maybe because of software updates?), so I would be struggling along desparately trying to follow the tutorial's steps and then bang, I'd hit a brickwall because the tutorial refered to something that I simply couldn't find on the screen.
(4) Sites it makes for you aren't 'liquid', i.e. they don't automatically resize on users' screens, although I understand this is on the wish lists. Even old FrontPage could do this! A surprising omission. The site I first made (from one of the suppled templates) was very tiny. The only way to get it to an acceptable size for publication was to manually change each and every frame and element in the Master pages.

Plus points:
(1) There a helpful folks on the forum, so it's well worth joining.
(2) It's a versatile program and has a lot of meat in it, even for professional site designers I should imagine.
(3) I liked the concept of 'Master' pages which underly your site pages and lock in common styles and features.

It's sold as being easy to use, but in my opinion it isn't all that easy. Under the bonnet there is a powerful piece of software, but it's the sort of product that you need to attend a one day intensive class course on in order to start flying on your own, OR be prepared to spend the equivalent of a couple of solid days getting to grips with it. My tip for the best way of doing that is first skim the User Guide (an essential purchase together with the Resource Guide), then dive in and try to build a site by modifying a template.

**** Four stars. (I edited this review and wanted to raise my star rating but for some reason you can change the text of the review but not the stars!)

WebPlus X2 no need for anything else
I run my own part time Web Design company called Urweb. I have always been a Dreamweaver Macromedia (now Adobe) fan due to the ability to build professional looking sites, with very little HTML. However I had many issues with Dreamweaver that I could never get around, so tried a few other programs, netobjects and the likes. However I could never get the results I was after. I decided to give Webplus X2 a chance and after a few hours getting to know my new companion, I must say I am blown away.
Yes it does produce some long winded HTML and yes it is difficult to amend your sites in other programs, but why would you want to use anything else.

This has it all from its own Database manager, to ecommerce, to fancy slideshows, all built in. And whats more if I want my picture in the middle of my website I can do it, no frames no problem. You want to make the picture 3D, there is a button does that too. You can add writing where you want, put in navigation bars, and when you update, add or takeaway a page, the whole site is updated automatically. I have now converted 4 sites to this program, including one which is over 100 pages. The great thing is that for £37, my clients can now update their own.

Dreamweaver is currently around the £1000 mark, Webplus a mere £37, there is no contest here. Well done Serif, now ANYONE really can design their own website. Hopefully not putting me out of business.