There's no way to dress it up: Homepage Maker 5 is not a very pleasant piece of software.

Even before the program had run for the first time, alarm bells had gone beyond ringing and entered complete and utter meltdown. The setup and installation flipped between English and German, the insistence on form-filling was grinding us down, and the seemingly compulsory requirement to register did not go down with us very well. 'Not register at all, ever' was not an option.

However, not least because this writer's fee is only payable on completion of the review, we ploughed on. Now there are - and it's not too tricky to find them - some terrific tools and applications that can greatly simplify the task of putting a Web site together, hiding any need for code and letting you simply focus on the content.

This really, really, really isn't one of them.

For long periods of our test, we found ourselves battling the software itself and its archaic, quaint way of doing business. Where rivals offer templates, useful wizards and intuitive help, this is like the last few years haven't happened. Faced with a blank screen and a bulky, if hardly devastatingly helpful manual, it was an immense challenge to get anything of value spat out the other end of the program.

Heck, even hitting 'minimise' and 'maximise' confused it often, and without the courtesy of offering a desktop icon, we had to go the long way round to restart the program, only to find it switched entirely to German. Hurray.

When we did finally get to a template to try to put our online virtual showcase together, we were left with the proverbial blank sheet of paper and little hand-holding to help us get the gist of how to maximise the tools on offer. Considering that this is the kind of application that's supposed to sell to an inexperienced enthusiast, who plucks it off the shelves of PC World precisely because of its name, that's utterly inexcusable.

Furthermore, content is managed in a fairly illogical way. Homepage Maker seems - and we can't be sure, because words to the contrary were either (a) in German or (b) missing - to want you to create individual pages the old fashioned way, which means going back to each page if you want to re-edit something. In an era when content management systems have genuinely lifted the technical burden from a great many people, this seems wrong.

The package also claims to have the capability to set up a Web shop, replete with payment capabilities. We certainly didn't try the latter, so depleted was our lack of trust in the software, and our tentative steps into the former produced a result that wouldn't tempt us to buy a Big Issue. Usually we'd put this down to a lack of talent on this writer's part, but in this case he's got a very convincing note from his mother. And it's in English.

Were we so inclined, we'd now find a suitable German passage to describe the ineptitude of Homepage Maker. But as they didn't bother fully translating their software into English, we really can't justify making the effort the other way round.

Don't. Just don't.