Review: Effective Studios Site Studio 6 design software

An easy to use website creator for the Soho market

Not every company or organisation requires a website with the very latest Web 2.0 bells and whistles.

With this in mind, Site Studio 6, from Effective Studios offers a more basic site design but with a view to make best practices for search engine optimisation available without a deep knowledge of web programming.

Before going any further it should be noted that this version is not suited to professional web designers as the licence only allows you to create websites for a single company. You will either need a separate licence for each company with a Site Studio website or shell out more for Site Studio 6 Pro.

There is a good selection of contemporary templates (most of which are stored online) and none look particularly dated. The website creation process takes its inspiration from content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla and Wordpress. The principle of these is that the design of the site is held completely separate from the content. The two big advantages of this are that it's very simple to make quick site-wide changes to design and there is no distraction when adding content.

The Site Studio 6 interface consists of two main views - namely Layout and Content. It takes a little while to get used to working like this, but you'll soon find it an efficient way of designing your site.

We did, however, have one frustration in the Layout view when trying to move the document text section to make room for navigation buttons. Div boxes for these buttons or static text and images can be rearranged with the mouse, but the document text position can only be set in the layout properties.

It makes sure that the content is positioned exactly but it was frustrating none the less. CSS layout is used whenever possible, which is a very good thing, but text columns are actually tables and it is not possible to link them so text runs from one to another.

Site Studio can create images for navigation buttons, which avoids problems caused by fonts not being available on client computers. Fields can also be used for often repeated text that may change, such as contact names, reducing the amount of time needed administering the site. As the formatting is set with CSS (cascading style sheets), site-wide font selection is simple.

Image galleries can be created with automatic resizing and borders if required. Adding individual images can be frustrating as there is no way to change the size of an image with the drag handles while also maintaining the aspect ratio of the image.

Site Studio proudly states that it produces clean HTML optimised for search engines. The code does indeed look clean, using CSS wherever possible for formatting. The document properties are added into the meta data for each page and tooltips are easy to set for both links and images.

Uploading the finished website is simple and the Upload Wizard is intelligent enough to only upload files that have changed.

Although websites created with Site Studio lack features such as RSS feeds or search options, they are ideal for organisations that want a web presence that looks good and is visible to search engines, but without the need for constant maintenance.

At £60 it may seem quite expensive given the open source alternatives (such as NVU and Openoffice web design programs), but this money would be quickly saved in being able to get the website set up with the minimum of training required. Before purchasing, you can download a free 30-day trial.