Corel and the Power of Gaudy

Before you ever spy the maker's name printed on the box, you know that the Web.Graphics Suite comes from Corel. The promise of over 7500 clip-art images, the promise of not one but six programs, the exclamation marks - all these hint at a Corel product. The real giveaway, though, comes from the color scheme. Among graphics software companies, only Corel would mix purple and green graphics with faux-gold lettering and expect the product to jump off the shelves.

If you think I'm making an unusually harsh judgment, visit voice.com, the home of Bud Uggly Design - and note their boast that they designed the site using Corel Products.

But Corel has long and successfully used gaudiness to sell product. The real problem with Corel's flash Web.Graphics packaging is that it encloses an uneven and often pointlessly gaudy product. The Web.Graphics Suite is a chocolate box full of fancy wrappers. Some of the wrappers contain real treats or enjoyable morsels; others are all wrapper and no treat.

The Good ...

Among the good stuff is the package's core program, Corel Web.Designer, also sold as a cheaper standalone package. Web.Designer is one of a new generation of Web page authoring tools which have sprung up in the past year.

Web.Designer competes well against its rivals. Its thorough Microsoft-Word-style button bar reminds you that this is not a beginner's program: it sports 57 buttons and three pull-down menus. Web page newcomers unwilling to put a lot of time into their work first-off will be better with Corel's Home Page Author, part of the far cheaper Internet Mania package. But Web.Designer is a smooth program for middle to high-end Web page creators.

You type in text just as you would in a word processor, or import text from common document formats using an ancillary program called Web.Transit. The buttons take care of all the basic tasks, such as inserting images and creating paragraphs, headings and links with specified fonts and colors. Dialogue boxes guide you through much of the work, such as specifying a background, and the program endearingly saves all your text, images and other sources into a local directory ready for uploading into the Web server. The program not only supports tables, forms and Java applets and forms, expected in these products, but also contains a built-in image-map editor. And you can preview your work in a chosen browser, such as Netscape.

All this smooth functionality makes you wonder, then, about the program's errors of omission and commission.

... The Bad ...

Color management is a serious weakness of the entire suite.

For a start, Web.Designer generates text colors which only more recent browsers will read. It could just as easily have been designed to create less browser-specific code.

But there's worse to come. Good Web designers try to optimise their text and graphics for a 216-color palette which displays cleanly in 256-color displays on both Windows and Apple machines. With all its color expertise, you'd think Corel would optimise for this, but it shows no sign of doing so. For graphics creation, the whole lot doesn't really measure up even against the inexpensive and admirable Paint Shop Pro shareware program, let alone more expensive Web graphics tools. In a not inexpensive package named Web.Graphics, this runs close to being inexcusable.

Then there's the garish stack of illustrations and templates which sit on the Web.Graphics CD. Good templates will be a very useful application for Web authoring tools, but don't hope for Corel to make a breakthrough anytime soon. Few of its templates are usable, some show simple lack of thought, and most resemble a bizarre cross between a sideshow alley, a teenager's bedroom and a down-market brothel. None of these 122 horrors are illustrated in the manual. Little wonder.

More surprisingly, the manual also fails to give you any help running the program, or any guidance on Web page construction or Web site maintenance. You'll have to use the software's help files instead. The manual prefers to detail hundreds of pages of clip art, Corel's longtime obsession and a key to its success. Some of that art, such as Corel's extensive collection of photos and an excellent font collection, is potentially useful (although CorelDRAW! 6 users will find some of it familiar). And all of it can be previewed in a nice little add-on program called Web.Gallery. But way too much of it consists of the sort of garish button, bars and backgrounds which already litter the pages of amateur site designers and which can be downloaded free from dozens of websites. What's it doing in a supposedly sophisticated package? Don't ask.

But there's more, as the people from Corel would say if they advertised on late-night TV. Corel Web.Move, an animation creator, ships with an impressive collection of pre-loaded animations and appears to be a sophisticated alternative to programs like Hot Dog's Egor Animator.

... And the Just Plain Weird

And most startling of all, the suite includes a program called Web.World for creating "worlds" in Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML). VRML is a fascinating technology (you can see demonstrations at Corel's Web.Move site). And Corel's VRML author appears to be a clone of Paragraph International's Virtual Home Space Builder, a quite heavyweight VRML author. But right now, VRML is a hobbyist product in search of some compelling application. It's another curious addition to the puzzling Web.Graphics mix.

Corel Web.Graphics, then, is the perfect program for an interesting piece of the market - committed page designers with money and time to spend on fancy features like Java and VRML, but who will be drawn to multicolored buttons and bizarre background designs, won't want to bother downloading them off the Web and don't need to fine-tune their pages. It's probably no coincidence that the creators of the unbearable, unmissable Voice.com boast of having used Corel products.

Chances are, though, that Web.Graphics Suite will sell well in the mass market. Corel's CorelDRAW! suites have long outsold competitors from Adobe and Micrografx. Truth is, Corel - perhaps better than anyone else in the software game - knows how to sell to the middle-of-the-market user. With Web.Graphics, Corel is once again deploying its potent combination of full-on hucksterism, buy-one-get-five-free value and sheer gaudiness.

Corel gives its own run-down of Web.Graphics at its own site.

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