EZ Generator 4: Decoding The Message

As independent producers of music we all recognise the value of solid promotion and good PR. The process of conjuring design concepts to enhance ‘the message’ or deliver the product has expanded our workflow into the further fields of visual creativity. The artist website profile is now an integral part of our end product. Profiling your work on the web is a valuable and creative way of engaging the public eye and capturing your visitor’s imagination and functions as a terrific business card when looking to secure a deal. Quite often, we are left behind in the skills department and, for some, realising that much needed website becomes a daunting proposition. The good news is – EZ Generator 4 is here!

I’ll say it now to save you valuable time; if you need a quality website with a small e-commerce shop facility for downloads, or a professional blog which delivers without the massive learning curve of intensive graphic design and coding? – go and pick up a copy of EZ Generator 4. The price of the EZ Generator 4 (at the time of writing) at €99 for the depth of design quality you receive is a truly amazing deal. It has to be the most creative and easy to use All-In-One web builder product out there.

EZ Generator 4 is a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) website builder software that is self explanitory, easy to navigate using its horizontal ‘ribbon’ navigation system and bundles with enough state-of-the-art widgets and gadgets to populate the most serious of website content. There are a vast array of templates to choose from and from which to start. All of EZ Generator’s templates are pre-coded with much sought after interactive elements like:
- Public ‘Contact Request’ forms with the complimentary ‘Thank you’ pages
- News Letter management system
- Site Search bars which organise your site content into a searchable archive
- all the ecommerce functionality you need to create online catalogues, product pages and a checkout.

EZ Generator is packed with a plethora of up to the moment widgets which provide incredible interactivity and attractive eye candy to your website. Under the widget menu you will find: An excellent selection of stylish media players capable of delivering all types of media content – Slide Show widgets – A widget for housing Flash banners – A Site Map widget with presets that generate hyperlinks to all your site pages – A Facebook ‘Like this page’ – In line frames and the quirky but useful Hidden Div plus many more to choose from. Dragging and dropping these widgets into your web design makes everything accessible with no coding needed. Most widgets contain a presets list to choose from and numerous options for customisation too.

If you have a flair for web design you will be pleased to learn that all elements of the website’s html and CSS are editable via their respective built in editors. You can freely import background images or change background colours at template level and individual page level. You can customise headers, buttons, divs, tables and tabs with images and change colour too. New colour schemes for fonts and hyperlink interactivity can be created easily. New pages and new menu items can be created with a simple right click in the left hand side explorer panel. Moving menu items in the main menu hierarchy is as easy as holding and dragging up or down, but do remember to refresh your site maps! I was very impressed with EZ Generator’s built in FTP component that connects and synchronises the website data folder on your hard drive with the htdocs folder on the server. Updating content on your server is seemless, fast and very reliable. When the server side connection data has been completed in the admin panel you’re away, and the updates are immediate.

Once you get a firm grip of the software, then working with EZ Generator 4 could open the door for a lot of visual experimentation in your website designs. In a very short space of time I created a new website from the ground up using only a background image as a starting point – www.soundwrxmultimedia.com. I was excited to discover the freedom of shaping a website layout by positioning divs within a page. It gave me total control over the design. I would highly recommend EZ Generator 4 because of its flexibilty of use in the design workflow. The fact that all widgets and php elements are, in the main, drag and drop and hard coded already, is a huge time saver and a major benefit. Couple this with the first class support you receive at Image-Line (across all products) and you have a recipe for a harmonious, creative and stress free solution for your every website need – now and for the future.