shop@noctalis
| ||||
| ||||
shop@noctalis
| ||||
| ||||
Published in PC World Singapore, June 2k. This is the original unedited version. The review for Adobe PageMill was taken out of the finished article as Adobe has decided to stop supporting the product.
– 17052k
In the Stone Ages (that would be 1990), a man named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Back then, you needed to learn a new language called HTML, for Hypertext Mark-Up Language, in order to create a homepage. That was then.
In time, numerous software companies created programs to do the HTML for you, but clunky interfaces, having to know how to use FTP in order to publish your pages onto the web, and other little things like those kept homepages in the domain of the nerds. But, again, that was then.
Things are different, now. With every business adding a dot com to their name, web designing has become a valid career choice. Web editing programs have become bigger and better in response to the needs of these designers, and, to capture more of the market, have simplified their interfaces so that anyone can create their own homepage. The better web editors – and who would use anything less than the best? – come with site management tools to handle the publishing, along with various functions to ease the creation process. Along the way, the editors with poorer performance and lower functionality have fallen by the wayside, leaving us with a handful of companies and their offerings to choose from.
Macromedia is big on the web; producing Shockwave and its lesser sibling, Flash, the de facto leaders in web multimedia. Dreamweaver, its web editor, is a favourite of web designers everywhere, and the company has recently announced that it will be releasing Dreamweaver UltraDev, a web application (not to be confused with web page) development tool. Adobe is best known for being the producers of Photoshop, the industry standard for digital image editing. It currently has a public beta for LiveMotion, directly competing with Macromedia’s products to put multimedia into web pages. Allaire is the developer of ColdFusion, a web application server that powers e-commence sites behind the scenes. And, finally, Microsoft. Of course, we all know Microsoft.
And which of their software best suits your needs? We measure them up and let you decide.
All four of the programs reviewed can estimate download times, create client and server side image maps, has a CSS editor and has functions to publish your edited pages to your web server.
Microsoft FrontPage 2000FrontPage is part of the Microsoft Office product suite and it shows. The interface is similar to MS Outlook, with little icons at the side to switch between different views – your site’s navigational structure, the folders your files are in and reports to show slow pages and older files. Tabs at the bottom of the page, similar to Excel, switch between WYSIWG editing, HTML and a preview page.
Creating a page is rather like using Word, with similar toolbars and menus. Like PowerPoint, you can add simple animation effects to your pages. Of course, we still have the background spelling checker, and importing files from other Office applications is a seamless process.
New features in this latest version include 60 pre-designed themes, betters tools for creating and customising your own themes, cross-browser dynamic HTML animation effects, customisable toolbars, and features to support multiple authors working together on a web site.
Creating a new theme is fairly simple, and a colour-wheel makes setting the theme’s colour scheme a breeze. The Eyedropper tool even allows you to pick a colour from anywhere on the screen. When you change a theme, FrontPage automatically updates the entire site, helping to keep the look and feel of your pages consistent without having to individually update each page. It also automatically rebuilds navigation bars and links when you rename a file, and can verify internal and external links.
For the novice, the Office interface keeps the product on familiar ground. FrontPage also comes with a host of pre-designed themes, templates and styles; more than any of the other web editors. For the advanced user, FrontPage preserves your HTML source code, allowing you to import and edit your existing pages without messing up your scripts and code. It also allows you to select which browsers, browser versions and technologies (ActiveX, Java, JavaScript, DHTML, etc) to support, automatically restricting features that would not work with your selections.
Macromedia Dreamweaver 3Dreamweaver has a huge support among professional web designers, partly due to Flash’s popularity as the chief way of adding multimedia interactivity to web pages. Being developed for professional designers, Dreamweaver is unfortunately alienating to first-timers, and there are no design wizards, themes or templates. The tutorial does help novices to orient themselves, but one still has to design a theme from the ground up.
New features in this version include a Quick Tag Editor, which enables you to add, remove or modify tags without leaving the design window, HTML styles for creating paragraph and character styles using standard HTML, better support for image maps, customisable menus and shortcuts, extensibility features accessible through their web site, additional objects to add dates, email links, navigation bars, jump menu objects, special characters and framesets, and collaborative features for multiple authors working on the same site. A welcomed new feature is the history palette, which allows you to undo any action, select and replay any number of steps, or save those steps for use later, like a macro.
The interface is fairly simple, with multiple floating toolbars and palettes. A separate formatting window helps you assign attributes to images and text, such as alignment, size and position, even object-specific properties like the alt-text for an image. While it does not have any templates of its own, you can save any document as a template and even specify editable and protected regions. Layering allows the creation of rather cool layouts, and a command lets you convert the layers into tables for use on older browsers. The program also uses a floating window for HTML editing, as opposed to the either-or views of FrontPage. Unfortunately, Dreamweaver does not have an internal preview window, so you have to launch a separate browser in order to check the results of your efforts. Also, while the program can check and update internal web pages, it does not support external addresses.
A nice feature for advanced users is the support for plug-in objects. It even supports third-party objects such as RealMedia, and when you place an object generated in Fireworks, it automatically pastes the code in the appropriate places. Fireworks is Macromedia’s graphics editing program, designed for editing and optimising graphics for the web.
Another plus point is that Dreamweaver, like GoLive, is focused on creating interactive and animated web pages, while FrontPage and PageMill is mostly for the creation of static web sites. You can create timeline animations either by inserting keyframes or by drawing a path directly in the work area.
A novice will have to take some time in order to master the program, but it serves as a good starting point if you see yourself creating multimedia web sites somewhere in the future. For the advanced user, Dreamweaver probably has the most useful and powerful features of the various web editors, and its integration with Shockwave and Flash is a plus point as well.
