Test Almost Over

As some of you may or may not know I have been 'playing' with the site building tool for the ZEN site for RPGs. My evaluation is that it is OK. Now what does that mean? That means NOTHING made me say "wow that is neat!" but on the other hand nothing made me curse for hours at it either - well maybe one thing but I am getting used to that issue.

The Tool
Trellix SiteBuilder-

First I ran a generated page through the w3 compliance checker. It failed on 23 counts. All failures are Trellix generated code, not webgems as they call them for my html.

Line 1 column 0: no document type declaration; implying "!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM".
Warning Line 7 column 211: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "sUrl".
Note that in most documents, errors related to entity references will trigger up to 5 separate messages from the Validator. Usually these will all disappear when the original problem is fixed.

Error Line 7 column 211: general entity "sUrl" not defined and no default entity.
Info Line 7 column 210: entity was defined here.
Warning Line 7 column 254: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "Command".
Error Line 7 column 254: general entity "Command" not defined and no default entity.
Error Line 7 column 261: reference to entity "Command" for which no system identifier could be generated.
Info Line 7 column 253: entity was defined here.
Warning Line 7 column 271: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "FileName".
Error Line 7 column 271: general entity "FileName" not defined and no default entity.
Error Line 7 column 279: reference to entity "FileName" for which no system identifier could be generated.
Info Line 7 column 270: entity was defined here.
Error Line 10 column 47: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
Error Line 14 column 20: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN".
Error Line 14 column 34: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN".
Error Line 14 column 50: there is no attribute "RIGHTMARGIN".
Error Line 14 column 66: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH".
Error Line 14 column 83: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT".
Error Line 21 column 39: there is no attribute "BACKGROUND".
Error Line 71 column 62: there is no attribute "BACKGROUND".
Error Line 71 column 139: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
Error Line 71 column 139: document type does not allow element "STYLE" here.
Error Line 118 column 112: document type does not allow element "DIV" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.
Error Line 125 column 110: document type does not allow element "P" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.
Error Line 139 column 112: document type does not allow element "DIV" here; missing one of "APPLET", "OBJECT", "MAP", "IFRAME", "BUTTON" start-tag.
Error Line 178 column 45: end tag for element "P" which is not open.
Error Line 205 column 154: required attribute "TYPE" not specified.
The W3C Validator Team

The document Failed W3 compliance.

Now that having been said, I IMMed a friend who uses JAWS 8 speech client and had them check the page. JAWs handled it fine, so the product does create code that is accessible.

The builder is very simplistic, it is designed to work ONLY with Netscape and I.E products. This of course cause a bit of cursing on my part, since I use Opera as my main browser. It would not allow me to start my site creations using Opera. However, I easily performed site maintenance and added additional pages using Opera.

The page file naming conventions leave much to be desired. They do not draw from the title nor do they prompt the user for a name upon creation. As a result they are named cryptically with such titles as ID1, ID2, etc.

The backgrounds supplied with the product are fairly boring in my opinion, but that is better than bad. A fair amount of editing is possible on the editable templates, from color to columns. It is easy to pick up and figure out.

I saw no archive or generation storage to allow for a rollback.

The manual and tool assume the user is not at all sophisticated and as such lacks information on advanced topics such as RSS feeds, frames, and tables. Although if you use the tool as is and are not trying to do anything too fancy, it functions well.

Overall I would recommend this tool for a small business who wishes to have a web presence or as a personal website builder. It could be used as a pure site maintenance tool or as a quickstart on a site. They did make changes over the period of the two weeks or so I used the tool, so the tool is trying to be improved. I will give it one or two more days of playing, then will rebuild as I wish. For the record, my styles tend to be a bit darker.