I am a network engineer and I design and implement networks for small- to medium-size businesses. I offer total solutions, including in-house servers with e-mail. I include sharing the Internet with routing and remote access and two network cards on that server. I include Web space and shared drives and printers. I even have a firewall solution for any size business. I also install Norstar telephone systems, including intercom, paging, voice call, and voice mail systems.

However, I never thought I was a very good Web designer. I always recommend another company to do that. I can put together small static Web designs, but moving icons and all that, I am not very good at.

The other day I received an e-mail about a small little program that builds Web sites, called CuteSITE builder 3.0. I thought I would check this one out myself. So, after getting a copy, I started building— or rebuilding— my personal family site that I had just finished. The first thing that was presented to me was a tree-like structure of the whole site, including all the sections of every page. Here's the layout:

This makes it very easy to see where you are when programming the site. As you can see in the layout above, the page I am editing has a yellow highlight. So far, no other authoring tool that I know of has this.

I liked the ability to create a template called a "page layout." This created a format that was common to every page. You could break the layout by unlocking the static text for each page that you desire. Then you add or delete anything you want but still have the text you designed in the page layout.

Another thing I liked was that you can make several pages part of a sequence which showed up at the top of those pages, allowing you to choose which page you would like to look at. For example, if you had different parts of a control that you wanted to show, like a switch, motor, belt, pulley, and wiring your page might look like this:

Notice that all you have to do is click on any one of the parts, or click on "Home" to go to the top, where "Parts" is part of the page you are creating. As you can see as part of the header, I am on the Switch part of the page. Of course this is just an example; I am not creating a page on my family site with parts of my washing machine.

I was a little disappointed that CuteSITE would not read WMF files. This is an important consideration because ninety percent of all clipart is in this format. When you purchase 125,000 piece clip art CDs, they are probably WMF files. Of course, you can always use another program to convert, but it would be nice if CuteSITE could read them without this hassle. It does read GIF, JPG, BMP, and TIF, as well as several other standard formats. It will even save the edited format and not the original picture you put in your Web site.

It has a built-in speller and many features for text formatting. It starts with a Web designer with many layouts to choose from, and helps you along the way of designing your cute little site.

All in all, it is not a complete product like many Web design programs are, but for doing quick and dirty sites that are just static in design, CuteSITE Builder is very easy to start with and is relatively cheap.

As I stated before, I am not a really good Web designer, but I can build simple sites that show just the general information, and sometimes I can play with animated GIFs and transparencies to make the site look a little better than a regular page. Blending colors and other special effects, I am not very good at. I used CuteSITE Builder for my family project and FrontPage for my main Web site.