About a month ago I posted “yes, we have no bananas“, a thread begun after I had a preliminary look at World Wide Interactive Services Site Builder product. I wasn’t impressed then and hoped to provide a more favorable report later. Over the past week I’ve been working with WWIS’s Site Builder tool. Unfortunately, my opinion of the product has sunk even lower.
The Good
- the response time is relatively fast
- the interface was relatively easy to use once I got used to it
- the image upload worked pretty well
The Bad
- You can’t upload or write your own style sheets. I tried including a block of styles (class and id) and the editor stripped them out. I was forced to use inline styles on HTML elements and when that didn’t work I had to use brute force on the HTML elements with unsavory code like valign=”top”.
- The basic color tool that allows you to set a standard color scheme for links doesn’t work. I set up a selection of colors for my copy and links. The font color worked but the link colors, including a:link, a:visited, and a:hover didn’t work.
- The ability to force vertical alignment a column on a long page doesn’t exist. I had an exceptionally long page and there’s no way to get the much shorter navigation on the left-hand side up to the top of the column. I even tried using valign.
- In fact, getting anything to look or line up correctly is difficult since I can’t use cascading styles.
I still haven’t seen the new and improved version which I’m told is coming. I seriously hope the new product addresses what to me are very common styling functions.
I should add the design I’m trying to implement isn’t very complicated. It’s pretty straightforward. I am very dismayed at the difficulty I’ve had getting as far as I have. I’ve had to simplify and even break good coding practices. I know this tool is for the user that doesn’t have any HTML or CSS skills but it should allow me to build a modest website.
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