The average human being who has no Web design experience but who can use Microsoft Word will find working with Easy WebContent a breeze. It's well worth the price to avoid the learning curve of expensive products that offer more than you need.

For the majority of users looking to run a single Web shop and who want more features than the standard stores offered by many ISPs, Actinic Catalog 9.0 is an excellent piece of software. Unless you need advanced payment and authorisation procedures (in which case Actinic Business is recommended), this will do everything that you need.

Expression Web 2 is an effective tool, allowing you to build sites that comply with XHTML, CSS, XML, and XSLT standards; its support for ASP.NET 3.5 allows the drag-and-drop use of assets such as Silverlight applications. This, the full support for Photoshop files and PHP pages, and the ability to insert Flash SWF and Windows Media files, make this probably the most valuable part of Expression Studio for the widest range of users.

XSitePro 2.0 is one of the best applications we’ve seen for aiding novices in creating professional-looking websites. But that needs to be borne in mind: this is not really a program for professionals themselves. Although it can create such things as scripts for search pages, XSitePro 2.0 handles page generation for you rather than being a tool for complex dynamic sites.

Caspio Bridge's crisp, business-like GUI brings Microsoft Access-like simplicity to building Web databases online. Caspio shines with tight integration with Microsoft Office applications and a clean pricing model. The SQL structure imposed on tables will be welcome to some, but restrictive to others. And while applications are built without coding, many old programmer tricks are still necessary. Table names, for instance, require underscores instead of spaces. The biggest limitation is there's no easy way to add arbitrary logic to Caspio's back end.