Website Maker Assistant Mode

The first step in Assistant Mode, “Select design”, is to select the category of website you want to create which filters the list of available templates. The categories include primarily home and leisure based activities such as animals, friends & family, vacation, and leisure although there is a business category.

Once you have selected a category you can scroll through the list of matching templates and see a preview. For example the business category includes themes for coffee shops, antique dealers, real estate, photography, and hairdressers. You can preview the theme before moving on.

Note: For the free edition many of the themes are optional extras, for example the Business category includes 24 themes but only one “Mobile” is actually available.

For this review let’s assume we are running a coffee shop so we’ll choose the Coffee theme and move forward through the assistant.

Next, you can specify and refine the default pages. Standard pages include Homepage, About Me, My Pictures, My Videos, and My Music and this is where the software shows its home use roots.

You might expect the business theme to include pages such as “About Us”, “Contacts”, “Our Products”, and so on but it doesn’t. This isn’t a real problem as you can edit the default pages but it’s a shame this hasn’t been thought about it in the application as it adds to the workload.

Each page lists the media and text that is available for editing and hovering over each item highlights it on the preview window. Clicking the item allows you to edit the details.

For images and video you can add your own media from a hard drive or web storage space whereas the text object brings up an editing window where you can edit the text directly. This way of building up a web page is very nicely handled and quite intuitive.

So, back to our coffee shop let’s consider the kind of pages we might include. Of course there will be a homepage, about page and contact page. We might also want a gallery (we can use the My pictures page for this) but we may also want an events page, menu, and let’s throw in a mailing list page.

The first step is to rename the pages to something more appropriate. It would be useful to move the other pages around and add and remove pages here but this isn’t possible under Assistant mode so we’ll do that later. Also, if your text doesn’t fit in the boxes provided you can’t resize at this point so you need to think about things a little.

Once the changes are made you can see a preview of your site and head into the third step which is Publish. At this point you can Save your website design (online), which would be a good idea, and then head into the publish page.

On the Publish page you choose which domain you want to publish the website to (included domains are of the predefined format username.magix.net) or you can go for the optional extra of getting a personal address of choice. If you don’t have a dedicated domain then it really is worth considering.

Once your site is published you will be notified and then you can let everyone know about your website using either Email, Facebook, or Twitter. Also, once published you can refine your site further, or keep it updated, using the Website Maker editor interface.