A lack of direct code editing features makes Serif WebPlus X2 unsuitable for professional site design – but there's enough here to keep most other users more than happy. Packed with features, brimming with extra resources and integrated with Serif's own Web services, it's a comprehensive and cost-effective choice.

You'll need a decent Web connection, and you can use it only once, but these are minor quibbles. Simple to use, and with more features than you have any right to expect, Takeaway Website is a winner.

AptEdit is very much a programmer's tool, especially for those programmers who regularly work with a variety of text files in several environments, as opposed to those with a dedicated development environment specialised for their language of choice. It's a bit beyond "whim" purchase, but the 30-day trial should be more than enough to let coders determine if it's the tool for them.

DX Studio 3 sits somewhere between a game-design engine and an ‘interactive experience’ design tool such as Adobe’s much more expensive Director — but for interactive designers this software is more than capable of producing a multitude of types of high-level interactive media for even the most demanding of clients.

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.

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.

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.

WaveMaker's visual tool allows new developers and talented HTML jockeys to build full J2EE Web applications with a few clicks—zero to CRUD (create, update, delete data) in five minutes or less. Help from a Java professional may be needed to debug arm-length stack traces when you step off the well-groomed path.

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.

This is a major development in Flash’s evolution. There are some great new features and kinks have been worked out. However, it’s frustrating that Adobe has felt the need to try to make Flash feel more consistent with the other Creative Studio applications.

A blinding debut release, Adobe AIR 1.0 lowers the skills requirements and costs for desktop deployment by leveraging a cross-platform runtime (from a single code base) and familiar Web technologies. Developers can take advantage of streamlined interfaces and a persistent local data store to give rich Web apps a native look and feel — including offline functionality.

It is almost unfair to review the Google App Engine when it is just a beta operation, but Google has a habit of leaving some tools in beta form for a long time. There are a number of places where the documentation and the code suggest that Google will add more functionality pretty soon. The basic framework and the database are both quite nice, although limited. We can imagine Google adding better automatic features for generating the CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) routines common in these applications. Integration with Google's Wallet might also be quite useful, although it's bound to be complicated by the banking system. Some people have already experimented with mapping the Google Web Toolkit to the system, even though that's written in Java and translated into JavaScript. Google might also provide some good tools that allow the different hosted applications to share user information, in essence allowing a user to move their preferences and some of their data to other applications. This kind of inter-application linking could be pretty cool. Time will tell what Google delivers. In the meantime, this is a good sandbox for playing with simple database applications. There's a very good reason why the beta version has a waiting list.

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.

Mr Site Takeaway Website Version Two is feature-rich, but the level of customisation is restricted because the templates themselves cannot be changed. Mr Site Takeaway Website is good value for money, since you get a domain name, one year of hosting, and an easy to use Web site creator for a reasonable price.