By Rev. Graeme MacNeil <gmacn1@eq.edu.au>

This review of WebIdeaTree has come into being due to two major reasons:

1. the entire eMathOnline site has been constructed with it (apart from some buttons);  and
2. it is an absolutley fantastic piece of web design and construction software.

• Background:
  In its early day, with the then MathOnline, I decided to use MindManager X5 Pro.  Now this is an amazing piece of software and is capable of many things.  It amazes me that one single piece of software can be used for mind-mapping, project management and the production of websites.  However, due to the nature of the material on the now eMathOnline site, MindManager could not work the magic that WebIdeaTree does.  Cool School Tools, Step-by-Step Math, WBm3 and eMathOnline all now use WebIdeaTree because of its versatility, user-friendliness and exceptionally fast website creation and maintainence.
  
  
• Why WebIdeaTree?
  WebIdeaTree is very much like a knowledge management program.  Ideas and thoughts can be easily added to a tree structure and then added to or removed as you feel necessary.  Those of you familar with MyInfo, TreePad and the numerous other tree-like structured software will appreciate the simplicity of using such software.  The added bonus with WebIdeaTree is the ability to quickly and accurately generate a full-on website including many features such as contents pages, index page, navigational aspects and custom layouts.  Almost every aspect of WebIdeaTree can be customized to your liking.

One of the great advantages is that everything in a WIT file is uniform.  There are no worries about using a template or duplicating a page to obtain the same look througout the entire website.  Just make some initial changes and viola! - Everything has the same format and this gives a uniform appearance to the whole site.

• What can WIT do?
  The short answer is ... Almost anything!  WIT sites can consist of frames, pages with panes, contain multimedia files, images, external and internal links, contents, indices with key-words, glossaries, bibliographies and many other concepts..  Every aspect of these concepts (ideas) can be modified using the built-in CSS editor and structure editor.  Did I mention ... There is also unicode support, great for those who use other languages.
  
  
• What do my colleagues and I use WIT for?
  Apart from using it to construct our entire sites, the feature of uniformity is a great plus! Cool School Tools is a business and education site, whereas Step-by-Step Math, WBm3 and eMathOnline are all educational specific sites.
  
  
• What about Support?
  Support is superb! Christophe Guibert, the creator of WebIdeaTree has always been very quick to respond to user problems, difficulties, general queries and comments about improvement or additional add-ins.  There are very few companies who can give and do give this type of unprecidented support.
  
  
• Pricing
  Pricing for a Personal License is very reasonable, being 30€.  The professional version which has a number of more advanced utilities is priced at 299€.  Although significantly dearer, it allows the renaming of pages and importing or exporting other WIT files and many other extra functions.
  
  
• Rating
  Well we have no five-star rating, five-cow rating or anything like that ... but I would rate it as one of the best available.