EASY DESIGNER Review

Software Review

PREFACE:

Easy Designer is the current offering by AOL to its members as a means of generating web pages. It is the successor to other offerings such as the two versions of Personal Publisher, the incredibly stupid 1-2-3 Publish, and the short-lived Hot Dog Express. The program Easy Designer cannot be downloaded for off-line use, nor does it offer the choice of saving pages other than into a members ftp space.

This review will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Easy Designer. The strengths in this case apply mostly to the rankest beginner, since that's the kind of user this was designed for. The program depends for its operation on use of java applets and requires a java virtual machine (jvm). Originally the jvm used was Microsoft's version, as supplied built into Windows 98. By the time Windows XP came along, a dispute of some sort between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems had eliminated the Microsoft jvm from Windows XP, so people using the XP version of Windows were unable to use Easy Designer. There has been some improvement, but still people who buy new PC computers that use Windows XP routinely lose the ability to use Easy Designer. Help in that regard can be found HERE.

STRENGTHS:

Quick success
Ready-made templates
Easy Editing
Easy Publishing
Easy Linking
Advanced HTML

Quick Success:

With Easy Designer, you can create a simple web page in just a few minutes, starting with absolutely NO knowledge of html coding or web page design. You see what you're creating, not exactly in WYSIWYG fashion, because separate entry windows have to be used to add text and pictures, which can then be freely placed on the page as rectangular objects. It may not be elegant, but it will give you an on-line "presence" in practically no time.

You get into Easy Designer by typing those two words into the address entry field on AOL's browser. That gets you into Easy Designer's opening screen, which offers these two major choices:

You click the appropriate one, depending whether you're starting a new page or editing an existing one.

Ready-made templates:

This idea came along partly from the incredibly simple 1-2-3 Publish predecessor program. If you are starting a new page, the program will offer you a series of categories and templates to help you get started.

The default answer is the blank page, and that of course leaves you free to use your own imagination. If you choose other than a blank page, a list of suitable topics will appear in that right panel. For example, if you choose Hobbies on the left, a list of popular hobbies will appear on the right. For an example, we chose hobbies, then photography. Clicking the Next button took us to a selection of layouts to choose from:

Given that we made a choice and clicked Next, we were offered choices of color schemes:

Choosing from that list got us to the stage where we could see the template and color scheme. There was a list of "tips" overlayed on that, but once we got rid of that, we had a page on which to do some editing:

The actual editing display is a bit larger than we've shown here. Notice that there are boxes around the various objects. To change one, we can use either of two methods. We can double-click the object itself, or click once and then use the toolbar's "modify" button. In either case we get an entry field in which to modify the selected item, with its current contents in place. By the way, the things shown in that image above are placed there at the start by AOL, just to show the page format as it would appear. When happy with changes, you save the page. Easy Designer uses an automatic assignment for file names. The first page will be named index.html. A second will be named page1.html, a third page2.html, and so on. If a page name already exists in your ftp space, Easy Designer will know that, and will assign your new page the next available name in its sequence. Once a new page has been saved, AOL will send you an e-mail to notify you and supply you with the Uniform Resource Locator (URL, or web address) at which the page can be found. For purposes of illustration, we created a new page with Easy Designer using the template shown above, modified it to include one of my own pictures, eliminated the pre-supplied pictures, moved things around a bit, and saved that. Because of existing named pages, that new one became page20.html in our ftp space. You can see it by clicking HERE.

Easy Editing:

Once you have one or more pages made and saved, you can go back and edit them. To do that, you use the "Open an Existing Page" choice from the entry screen. Easy Designer will load, and will then produce a list showing all the html files in your ftp space. Here you have a chance to run into trouble. If a page you select was created or edited using any program other than Easy Designer, you will not be able to open it for editing in Easy Designer. If, for example, you created a page with this program, then made some minor edit using AOLpress or Front Page, it will no longer be editable in Easy Designer. The only exception to that rule concerns old pages made with 1-2-3 Publish. Those CAN be edited with Easy Designer, and will then bear the Easy Designer label at the bottom of the page.

Once you have the page in editing mode, you will need to select an object from the existing ones, or choose to add a new object to the page. Before going further, we should show you what the Easy Designer toolbar looks like:

Nothing mysterious there. The only one that's a bit strange is the "preview". That's used to get a look at the page without those object boxes, as it would normally appear on line. Also not immediately obvious is the capability of the "color" tool. That can be used to change the colors of things, including text and background, but also offers a customize option in which you can install a background image of your own if you like.

Items in the page get edited one at a time as you select them. Objects get placed physically by drag-and-drop with the pointer. Object sizes get adjusted by pulling on their outlines. There is no arbitrary limit on the number of objects that can be put on a page, but each must occupy its own rectangle without overlapping any other. Easy Designer will not allow a page to be saved if it has one or more overlaps. (A big red warning word Overlap makes them easy to spot.)

Easy Publishing:

If you have made and saved a page with Easy Designer, it is already published, as part of AOL's "Hometown". Unless you have intervened in the normal process, the page will be listed in Hometown by both the major category (e.g. hobbies) and the sub-category (e.g. photography) that you used when creating it. You can make it show up in additional categories if you like, by visiting keyword Hometown. It is possible to remove the page from all Hometown categories, but any time you edit and save again will cause it to be re-listed in Hometown.

Easy Linking:

Linking pages together with Easy Designer is fairly simple. Either text or pictures can be used as linked objects. All that's needed is to bring the item into edit, then select (usually just part of a text item) and click the link checkbox.

This dialog box allows the selected object to be linked to ANY file that is accessible on the Internet, provided you know the correct URL for that file. This same dialog box, using that third radio button, can also create a "mailto" link for sending mail to any valid e-mail address. (When you click the button, it will place your current screen name's address as a default entry, but you can change that.) Linking, then is easy.

Advanced html:

This is the "ultimate" capability for users of Easy Designer. One can insert html coding directly into the web page anywhere it's desired. The key is that word "insert" on the top of the toolbar. You click there and get a list of options, the last of which is "advanced html". Clicking that choice produces an input box that appears just like a text input box. It's NOT the same. Html cannot be added through a text input box, but only through this html input box.

Once in the html input mode, the sky is the limit. You can insert any valid html code. You can also insert sections of javascript, with few limitations. (Javascript that is specified for use in the head portion of a page cannot be inserted in Easy Designer pages this way.)

There are many uses for this capability. Here is a link that will provide you with some ideas and methods to use advanced html with Easy Designer.

WEAKNESSES:

Slow operation
Limitations
Inefficient coding
Advanced HTML

Slow operation:

Easy Designer, at least for those using dial-up connections (like me) is painfully slow. Just getting it started takes more than sixty seconds, and then the execution of every requested operation is also quite slow. Loading a selected page (even a very simple one) into the editing window can take another thirty seconds. Getting an object (text or image) into an editing box takes another ten seconds or so. There is then a lag in editing operations per se, just enough to make you wonder if anything is happening. If you have extensive editing to do, the sluggish response at each step of the process can be downright maddening!

When you have finished your editing, you can never be sure that the results can be saved. On many occasions the attempt to save will cause an incorrect and irrelevant error message. Sometimes just trying again will clear the error and allow the revised page to save, but that's not always the case. Sometimes the file dropdown on the toolbar, then save from there will work after the save button on the toolbar has failed. Sometimes even that fails, leaving you unable to save your page with changes. Maddening!

Limitations:

In most web page editing programs, the size of a page is essentially unlimited. One page can contain thousands of paragraphs of text, hundreds of images, and so on. Not too long ago I found an entire Dickens novel on-line, and the whole thing (hundreds of pages in book form) was just one giant html file. There were anchors to get you to the beginnings of chapters, but still all in one file.

Some users of Easy Designer are writers of poetry, essays, or even large books. Many have complained on message boards to the effect that the page length limit in Easy Designer has severely cramped their creativity. Nobody seems to know for sure what the actual page size limit is, but most agree that after scrolling about three screens downward, one reaches the end of the editing page, and no more can be added. The only choice then is to create multiple pages and link them, or to use a different program, such as AOLpress, Front Page, Dreamweaver, and such, where no such limit seems to exist. (Note: AOLpress, which I use, may actually have a limit, but I have created extremely long documents without finding a limit.)

The other size limitation, which seems arbitrary, is the size of image files that can be used. People routinely complain on message boards that Easy Designer refuses to let them use images of over 60 kbytes. Again, I don't know what the actual limit is, and try to keep my own images much smaller just on the issue of download time for viewers. Still, if I wanted to use a 300 kbyte image, the editing program should not stop me.

I'll call this next limitation "lack of adjusability", for want of a better term. What I mean is that a page made with Easy Designer cannot automatically adjust itself to the dimensions of the browser window. Thus if the page looks fine in the smaller width of the AOL browser window or the Internet Explorer window, jumping to a wider window will make the page seem to be all crowded into the left, instead of spreading to fill the new window. This page, made with AOLpress, will adjust itself to just about ANY browser window size without ill effects. Things centered in a small window will remain so in a larger one, text will word-wrap correctly in all windows, and so on.

Easy Designer, however, uses a complex array of table cells to construct a page, and the width and height of each cell is fixed, so no self-adjustment is possible. Many complain about this, but it is simply a result of the program's design, not something the user can overcome.

That same characteristic, the use of a complex array of table cells, makes Easy Designer incompatible with framesets. Let's make this as clear as possible. It IS POSSIBLE to use a page made with Easy Designer inside a frameset made by some other program, but it seems to be impossible to make use of a frameset within an Easy Designer page. That said, some users have managed to include iframes by the advanced html insertion method. Results are often not what the user intended, however.

Inefficient coding:

This weakness is one that won't bother most users, but it bothers me just on general principles. By profession, I'm an engineer (electronics) and efficiency is one of the engineer's primary design goals. It bothers me if a web page that could occupy 10 kbytes or so winds up taking more than 20 kbytes. The pages made by Easy Designer are, in my opinion, woefully inefficient in use of file space. Look again at this simple web page: page20. Not much there, but the html file itself (without graphics) occupies 3676 bytes. You can see the actual html source that the file is made of by clicking HERE. You'll see that the entire body section is contained in a table, and the width is specified at 601 pixels. You'll also notice that the table contains lots of empty cells just to provide the spacing of objects in the page. If we wanted to, we could create a page with all the same content in about 2000 bytes of html code using AOLpress or some other editing program. Of course that might seem petty since AOL provides 100 MEGAbytes per screen name as soon as you save one Easy Designer page under that name.

Advanced HTML:

No, we have not gone crazy. We listed Advanced html under strengths, above, but that same feature can become a weakness, too. We'll just use one example to illustrate how this feature can get users into troubles that they don't understand. This particular trouble is most often caused by the insertion of webring banners through advanced html.

Let's say, for example, you've laid out a page that has several rows of pictures all nicely lined up near the top, with small spaces between the pictures on the row. Looks great! Now you decide to enter your page into a webring of others with your interests. You ask to be admitted and in due course you are sent a package that includes a graphic for the ring and a section of html coding that will provide the graphic and the links to operate in the ring. (Usually it will take a while to figure out how to get that all onto your page.) Eventually, you get the image uploaded into your ftp space, and the html coding into a spot near the bottom of the page as an html object. When in editing mode of Easy Designer, everything looks fine. The place where the webring graphic will go is occupied by a rectangle with the words "html object" in it. You save the page, then look at it with the normal browser. Suddenly the alignment of things is radically different! The pictures along the top are all spaced much farther apart. You go back to the editing mode, and the spacing looks fine. What can be wrong?

Usually, the problem arises because Easy Designer assigns a fixed size to html objects, something like 175 pixels wide. The actual graphic for the webring is usually not that same size, but perhaps two or three times that width. When the browser displays this page, that wider object, even though it's below the pictures, distorts the cells of the table that takes in the whole page, thus ruining the spacing of the rest of the page. I know this sounds like an exception to the "no self adjusting" mentioned above. Not being a designer of browsers, I can't tell you why both things can be so, but they are. You can correct this distortion by stretching the width of the html object box on the editing screen until it's the same width as the graphic. It's not easy, but CAN be done.

If you need to fix that kind of thing, send me an email and I'll supply detailed instructions. This is just one of many examples where the ability to throw in html without knowing exactly what you're doing can get you pulling your hair out! AOL does NOT know how to fix this particular kind of problem, by the way. They'll tell you to clear the cache, update the browser, or some other thing that will fix NOTHING.

OVERALL IMPRESSION:

Easy Designer is probably good for first-time web page makers and I would give it a 3 star rating for those users. However, it will soon be outgrown by anybody who wants to advance his skills and at best I would give the program a 2 star rating for intermediate users. It would be best to consider moving up the ranks to a more flexible software program, especially if you want to create an extensive website. AOLpress is free and good. FrontPage costs between $159-$199 and is good, but has features that are not compatible with AOL's servers. However, it should be noted that these features; i.e. counter, forms, guestbook, etc. (items requiring the use of FP webbots) require workarounds with Easy Designer as well so the lack of extension support should not pose a problem.