WebMatrix

On the whole I find Microsoft products quite competent and usable. I came across Webmatrix quite recently, billed as a simple web page design tool, where websites can be created and published for free. The home page for the application had the Wordpress logo on it so I thought it was worth downloading and having a look. I already have Artisteer, and – now that a few settings have been changed on my servers – installing plugins and updating Wordpress directly is a breeze.

The first red flag for Webmatrix was that you can’t download and install it directly. It has to download a stub and then there are online downloads and installations that happen within another program. Twelve products in all were downloaded and the ‘minutes’ that it was supposed to take was closer to half an hour.

When it was finished dumping software on my hard drive I launched the app and selected the create Wordpress page option, whereupon it told me that MySql wasn’t installed and would I like to install it? I select yes and am presented with a request for username and password. Tip for Microsoft: don’t create and distribute programs that have this level of failure at the ‘create document’ stage.

It was probably the quickest time software was on my computer before being removed. And, of course, all the twelve applications had to be uninstalled one at a time.

Someone should tell Microsoft that installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to then install Webmatrix and add ons before installing the latest version of web applications is not simple but is in fact a fairly complicated procedure; particularly in comparison to something like Wordpress which does in fact have a simple five minute install. The database stuff for Wordpress is dealt with before installing Wordpress, not after. Simple fact, if software isn’t usable it wont get used.