WebsitePainter 4+

A very nice app - but with reservations

WebsitePainter is generally a well thought out app with a lot of good features. It is certainly capable of producing attractive and functional websites without a lot of technical knowledge. It permits flexibility and control over layout that is not available in its costlier competitors, and while a selection of templates is available, it is also possible to start with a blank webpage. The user interface is well-designed and mostly intuitive to use, and an instant preview feature is available to enable the current page to be viewed in the default browser. I find the master pages, layout containers, content placeholders and IFrames to work well and they are easy to use.

All of this is very nice, so why do I give it only a three star rating?

Most apps have their bugs and irritations, and WebsitePainter unfortunately has its share. Many of them are quite minor and might not affect all users. It is not fair to detract from what is otherwise a good app to publish a list of issues, but it is worth mentioning a few examples.

There is a functional disconnection between the the layout editor’s tabs, and the Document Explorer and Properties windows on the left side which do not update as expected when a new tab is activated. This issue can be clearly seen in the screenshot above where the active page is index.html, the selection in the Document Explorer is kontakt.php and the Properties window is not displaying properties for the selected item on the right.

Text alignment in the text boxes is buggy. Contextual menus remain open. Nudging multiple object selections causes them to become out of alignment. And I do not understand why WebsitePainter wants to open a new project each time it is launched. All of these are relatively minor issues and hopefully will be addressed before the next release.

My more serious concern is that on a couple of occasions I have run into issues with project files becoming corrupted or not working properly in the app. I have a project where the active webpage in the editor tab has vanished from the Document Explorer list and is also missing when the website is published. I have recently had instances where PHP code added before the header is omitted from the published PHP webpages.

So, Ambiera, please fix these issues then I can soon give WebsitePainter four or even five stars.