Xara, the company behind Web Designer 7 Premium, was acquired by the German software firm MAGIX AG in 2007. While MAGIX continued creating its own brand of website creation software, Xara was able to remain autonomous. This means that while two competing products have come from the same parent company, there's little crossover between them.

Essentially, Xara Web Designer 7 Premium is a desktop application aimed more towards people with web design experience, while MAGIX Website Maker 5 Deluxe is more suited to casual users and beginners.

Unlike Mr Site Storefront, Website Maker 5 is better for personal websites than online shops. This is evidenced by template themes like 'Football', 'Party' and 'Summer', which you can choose when you begin using it though you can also start with a blank page.

The templates look pretty good, and if you're looking for an easy way to make and publish an attractive personal site, then MAGIX Website Maker 5 Deluxe is a very good choice. Adding videos, photos and animations is incredibly simple, and out of all the tools we tested – apart from Yola – it proved to be the quickest for putting together good-looking website with its own domain name and hosting space.

Various features can be dragged and dropped onto the site (the media playback and photo gallery widgets look particularly good and work well), but there are no dedicated ecommerce tools. Instead we had to drag a HTML box onto the page, then copy and paste code from our Google Checkout account.

This left us with an attractive website, with only limited ecommerce abilities – not something we had hoped for.

If you think that MAGIX Website Maker 5 Deluxe sounds too limiting or even patronising for your needs, then its stablemate Xara Web Designer 7 Premium will be a much better match for your needs.

However, if you simply want to make a quick and great looking personal website to share media, then this is one of the best tools for the job.

The Mr Site brand is known for making the process of creating and editing websites very easy. Mr Site Storefront is a new product that focuses on e-commerce.

Previous Mr Site products featured basic selling tools, similar to most of the other site creation programs we've tested here, so how well does Mr Site Storefront fare with this new focus?

The answer is very well. Eschewing some of the more conventional tools included with most website building services, Mr Site Storefront is an excellent choice for creating a website designed to make you money.

As with the Namesco Ecommerce service, if selling products isn't your website's primary goal then you're going to find the features quite limiting. Like previous Mr Site products, all the creating and editing is done online. After logging in, we were presented with an overview showing how much money our website was making, how many orders were completed, the number of products sold and a list of our best-selling products.

Creating a website is easy. You start with a blank page with a number of 'zones', into which you can drop widgets. The widgets are geared towards ecommerce and add some impressive features, like a display of previously viewed items, which give your website a more professional feel.

There are plenty of themes available. You can even select a theme that interests you and then 'test drive' it. This is a good way of seeing how your website would look with the chosen theme, with the settings applied to your existing website without any changes actually being made.

While the actual website creation might be a little on the basic side, Mr Site Storefront really excels in the level of detail it provides about your shop and its customers. The ability to view customers and export them to XML or Excel spreadsheets is a great touch, whilst generating reports is an essential tool for online shops.

If you want a quick and simple way to get a professional and feature-rich website for selling products, we heartily recommend Mr Site Storefront.

While many website creation programs include e-commerce tools that let you sell products through your newly-created website, sometimes they feel like an afterthought. Not so with Namesco Ecommerce, an online service that focuses on making sites for online shops.

This is a great package if you're looking to make money out of your website, but if you just want to make a personal website, then the advanced ecommerce tools will be wasted, and you're better off going for a software package with a broader remit.

Namesco Ecommerce was easy to get started with, and the Setup Assistant walkthrough did a good job of displaying the templates and giving us an idea of what our website would look like. Templates are divided into categories like Clubs and Organisations, Computers and Electronics, and Crafts.

Each template also has a rating out of five to show how customisable it is. This let us make informed decisions about how the website would look before it was created – a far cry from the trial and error approach we had to adopt when using Web Easy Professional 8.

Adding web pages to the website was a simple affair, and proved to be a case of ticking a box next to the page we wanted. Certain pages, including 'Terms and conditions' and 'Contact information', were highlighted as legal requirements – a very helpful feature that seems to have been overlooked by the other programs, and is essential for protecting your fledgling business.

The list of pages you can add is dictated by the template you choose. Another great feature is the ability to collect statistics about your online shop to help you determine customer behaviour. This can prove to be an essential tool for making money as you learn which products appeal to your visitors.

It might not be the most flexible of website creation tools we've tried but if you want to quickly and easily create a dependable website for selling products that protects you and your customers, then this is an excellent choice.

Rather than going out of its way to appeal to new users, SiteSpinner Pro sticks to a plain and no-nonsense approach. We found that how well you get on with it really depends on your previous experience of creating websites.

If you're confident making websites and want to get started straight away then you'll appreciate SiteSpinner Pro's straightforward design. If you're new to website design, however, you may feel lost when presented with a blank page and lots of unfamiliar tools.

We found that making a website from scratch took a great deal longer than with the other programs. There are plenty of tools to use when creating a website, and they let us add advanced features without the need to enter any code, but they weren't labelled brilliantly.

We had to spend some time experimenting with each one before we understood what it could do. The level of detail and control you have over various actions, behaviours and objects is excellent, and SiteSpinner Pro gave us far more scope for designing and editing a website than the other tools on test.

This freedom comes at a price though, and you should expect to spend a lot longer making a working website using this program.

SiteSpinner Pro offers the ability to create a website from templates, but none of them look great and some are quite outdated. We don't mind a bit of depth and complexity to our website creation tools, but after using the drag-and-drop simplicity of some of the other programs, it did feel to us at times like a bit of a slog as we clicked through a number of menus and entered values into poorly labelled boxes to implement a feature that only took a few seconds in other products.

There's no doubting that this is a powerful web creation package, and if you have the time and resources available to invest in using SiteSpinner Pro to its full potential, your patience will pay dividends.

However, if you want to create a fully functioning website with as little hassle as possible then Xara Web Designer 7 Premium is a better choice.

Doodlekit is another online-only site builder, but it does things differently to Yola.

With Yola, when we began creating our website we were asked to fill in most of the details first. Our basic website was then built with the information we had provided.

Doodlekit takes a minimum of information, including the website name and what type of site it will be (personal or professional), and then creates a website with placeholder text and images. The text explains how each area of the website works, and how you can edit it. It's a similar method to that used by Xara Web Designer 7 Premium, and it works well.

Editing the web page is as simple as hovering the mouse over the relevant section and clicking 'Edit'. When we clicked on a section, a new window opened. This let us edit the page in a WYSIWYG interface, or via HTML. The ability to add your own code is great for giving you extra control over your website, and allowed us to add some more advanced features.

While adding photo albums, pictures and tables is pretty simple, Doodlekit lacks the drag-and-drop simplicity of some of the other tools here when it comes to adding more advanced website features. Instead you click a button to add the HTML, which you need to find yourself. It's not that complicated – especially if you have experience of using HTML – but it meant that it took us slightly longer to create a fully functioning website than some other packages.

Adding PayPal or Google Checkout to your website is also relatively straightforward, though you can't embed the store or your products into an existing web page. The option to create a store isn't immediately obvious – and isn't available to owners of free accounts – so a little digging is required.

You can add the HTML for shopping carts manually if you have a free account. Doodlekit claims that no HTML knowledge is needed, which is true to an extent. You can make a simple website without trouble, but to make the most of the features and to create a more versatile site, you need to know a bit of code.

Yola has more in common with online website creation services like Geocities and Tripod than its desktop competitors. There are various pros and cons to consider when using an online website creation tool.

The benefits are that you can access and edit your website from any PC as long as it's connected to the internet, but the downsides are that web-based services aren't as powerful as most desktop software packages, and your site is often tied to the service's servers.

You can create a free website or a paid-for premium site. While the free websites you can create are perfectly acceptable and come with most of the features of the premium version, they only have basic templates and contain Yola adverts.

Paid-for Yola Silver accounts remove the branding and include a domain name, premium templates and advertising credits for Yahoo and Facebook. The price is quite steep at £62 a year, so it isn't ideal if you're just planning to make a personal website.

However, if you're making an e-commerce site, the Yola Silver account can help make your business stand out – and those advertising credits will come in handy too.

Creating a website took us no time at all, and Yola has one of the best interfaces we've seen. Creating an account and entering details of our site and company helped populate the website. This was done in a similar fashion to Web Easy Professional 8, but it was much more clearly laid out and explained, giving us a better idea of how the site would look.

There was a good selection of templates available, but the gulf between the free and premium templates is huge, with the free templates being very simple. We were able to edit the layout and background to some degree, and with a premium account we could edit the CSS styles, but nothing else.

Adding features was simple, and adding e-commerce features was particularly easy.

Though not as in-depth as some desktop applications, Yola offers a quick and easy way to create a website, though it does sometimes feel restrictive – especially the free version.

With a name like Web Easy Professional, it's no surprise to find that the focus of this software is on simplicity.

A balance between simplicity and versatility is essential for website creation software, and we found that Web Easy Professional 8 didn't quite get that crucial balance right.

Almost all of the templates included with Web Easy Professional 8 look tacky and outdated. When selecting a template, we were shown a small thumbnail of what the website would look like, which was too small to accurately see what the result would be.

For a better look, we had to skip through a number of steps in the website creation walkthrough. If we weren't happy with the template (and we frequently weren't thanks to some poor designs), we had to start the walkthrough all over again. This is a good example of how Web Easy Professional 8's vaunted simplicity ends up causing more work for the user.

One of the steps asks you to replace the stock images with photos from your PC. This strangely convoluted process involves browsing your computer for photos and adding them to a list, then selecting an image from the list and pressing an arrow icon for the photo to be inserted. You can only see which photo will be replaced by peering at the small thumbnail, making it difficult to see how your changes are affecting the website.

You can also enter text in fields during the walkthrough to populate the website, but once again we felt that instead of making things simpler, it in fact made things more complicated, because you can't be sure where the fields will appear in the final website.

The process of adding e-commerce components is also tricky, and we had to go through a number of steps and menus before we could add PayPal.

With Web Easy Professional 8 it's possible to make a working website and publish it to the internet in about an hour, but we found that we wasted time struggling against some counter-intuitive design decisions and the results were far from great.

Xara is one of the UK's oldest software developers, and since 1981 it has been associated more with drawing and illustration software than web design.

Regardless of this, its Web Designer software is now in its seventh version, and the experience the company has accrued over the years is readily evident, from its accomplished interface to the versatile tools contained within – some taken straight from Xara's excellent design software.

Double-clicking a template from the Design Gallery gave us a ready-made website that just needed us to replace the placeholder text and images. If you simply want to get a website up and running quickly, this is all you need to do.

There are quite a few templates to choose from, and they range from the insipid to the moderately attractive, and while they err more towards bland than mind-blowing, they offer a good base to begin designing a website.

Xara Web Designer 7 Premium offers plenty of scope for configuring templates to make eye-catching and unique sites that fit your vision. We particularly liked the fact that that when we changed the basic colours of the template, our website reflected the changes in real time.

Each template comes complete with a number of web pages that can be easily arranged and edited, with links in your site's navigation updating automatically. This let us concentrate on editing the layout and adding essential features rather than having to fiddle with the often frustrating details of website creation. There's also a handy tool that optimises all images on your website for use online.

Advanced features like embedded videos and Google Maps can be dragged and dropped onto a website, and the range of included ecommerce widgets – including PayPal and Google Checkout tools – is good, though in practise they just take you to a website where you download the HTML to insert yourself.

Nevertheless, with Xara's robust range of tools at our disposal, we were able to make an attractive and fully functioning ecommerce site in just over an hour.

With iWeb seemingly mothballed by Apple and few other companies stepping up to the plate, Realmac had a great chance to blow people away with RapidWeaver 5.

While the company hasn't dropped the ball, this update represents a fumble. The good news is that RapidWeaver remains a usable, straightforward product for building your own websites, with enough extensibility to cater for anyone making tentative steps towards hand coding.

Throughout the application, the interface is logical, looks good and has been polished a little since the previous version; there's a useful new projects window and a noticeable speed boost, for example.

There are also new features, including a bookmarks manager for storing webhost connection details, site-map creation (both HTML and XML), and support for Safari's Web Developer Tools and Google Analytics (the former of which seemingly requires activation in RapidWeaver's preferences, but beats the native source viewer by a mile).

One of the trumpeted new features, Site Resources, is a bit more creaky, however. It enables you to store elements such as PDFs in the sidebar for later linkage. RapidWeaver helpfully keeps an eye on their local location should you move things about, and it correctly uploads everything to a resources folder on your live site.

But despite its helpfulness in this regard, the application seems unnecessarily fussy when it comes to the type of documents you can drop on the sidebar, and was only reliable when using the Add Resource button.

Elsewhere, RapidWeaver 5 proves to be a somewhat disappointing update, largely regarding the process of making web pages. Galleries remain fiddly to create and are visually mediocre when viewed in the browser.

The split between content editing and visual preview is irksome and dated, especially when Edit Mode doesn't even attempt to differentiate differently styled text; for example, various levels of headings are all merely highlighted in green.

At the very least, we by now hoped to see the option for a live preview alongside Edit Mode. And for all Realmac's crowing about adherence to good code, it's intensely annoying that web-page text isn't automatically wrapped in paragraph tags – you instead must do this manually or have your code full of line breaks.

On the plus side, this latest version consolidates CSS, which slightly speeds up outputted sites. Slow to progress RapidWeaver 5 falls short of our expectations. The majority of the changes are incremental rather than revolutionary, and most of the application's shortcomings remain.

Also, when companies increasingly offer single-button WordPress installs as standard with even cheap hosting plans, it's tough to recommend a £50 application that offers relatively few advantages over a modern free blogging system.

Between two worlds

RapidWeaver hovers in that uncertain limbo between competent introductory application and out-of-date, restrictive software solution.

For anyone who absolutely must have a Mac-based web design capability and work on sites locally rather than in the browser, RapidWeaver's still the best bet for novices (although if you've already got RapidWeaver 4, we'd question you splashing out $39 – £25 – on upgrading). But this is an underwhelming update and we were hoping for more.

Web design and production is generally seen as either geeky and technical or based on choice-limiting templates. But these two extremes are both neatly avoided by Freeway 5.5 Pro.

We looked at Freeway Express 5.5 and liked it a lot. We've been using the Pro version since then, and it's now our favourite program for making web designs and sites.

Freeway Pro's templates are just like those in the Express version; functional, better than before, but not dynamic in the way that iWeb or RapidWeaver's are. But that's not a criticism, just a difference. The templates can certainly get things started and they're good for learning from, but this is a program meant for free-ranging page designing rather than slotting content into something ready-made.

The interface is very desktop publishing-like – no geeky tendencies are required of you. Set up as many pages as you like in your Freeway document and jump between them in the Site panel on the left. Plan out your designs using page layout standards like master pages (for repeating content) and design grid structures.

The HTML and graphic boxes are like text and picture boxes in print software, although graphic boxes can also be used to set 'graphic text' if you prefer – rendered as bitmap images of fine-set typography. This is no good for search engine optimisation, but great for special headline typesetting.

You can import, crop and scale images in any format, including native Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF and TIFF; they will be converted to the right stuff for you in the output process.

Top-level designs

You don't deal with HTML, because you're working in a higher-level design model than HTML code can provide. Your layouts are generated in standards-compliant HTML, CSS, JavaScript and web graphics on the fly when you preview or publish your work. There's nothing in Freeway to tweak with a text editor, but you can add markup to objects in various ways to work around this if you need to.

But actually, Freeway's Actions – plug-ins that add all sorts of features and tricks – are generally a better way to customise the output easily and facilitate replication.

Freeway Pro lets you add custom ones to the ones that come as standard – think YouTube and HTML5 video, Adsense, RSS integration, PHP integration and more. For a number of these, be sure to check out both www.softpress.com and www.actionsforge.com.

Freeway Layers

Another big difference between the Express and Pro versions is the support for CSS-Positioning, or Layers as they're called here. Anything set as a layered object is generated as a 'div' in the published HTML; anything that's not layered is held in place as part of an invisible table. (Don't want to have tables used in your design structures? Keep things layered. Want to switch things about? Just click the Layer checkbox for any object.)

New to Freeway 5.5 Pro is the Showcase program, something that makes creating photo galleries and slideshows a simple process. You can have a gallery up and running in just a few minutes – a refreshing change, since this was a tedious manual job in older versions of Freeway. It's good to see the developers implement a new feature so seamlessly.

Freeway 5.5 Pro is both easy and powerful – get it and you'll be getting on with making sites quicker than you probably imagined.