Adobe GoLive 1 – Review

Adobe GoLive
Company: Adobe Systems
Price: $299.95

Recently I was on a job hunt around Portland, Maine. After several weeks of scoping out the classified ads, I realized one thing: there is a lot of money to be made in web page development and design. Personally, I had done some web design in the past on a freelance basis, but the majority of my web creations had been for my own personal fun. In other words, in the job market, I would be described as a “casual” web slinger.

I do know HTML pretty well (i.e. I know what I’m looking at when I look at code, and know what code to steal to accomplish what I need to do) but it always seems as though I’m several steps behind the “cutting edge” web design crowd.

The main reason for this is that I could never see the sense of learning straight up HTML code when there are numerous WYSIWYG web page compilers out there that I could use to quickly generate pages. I mean, why spend the time typing in a line of code to position a piece of art on a page, when I can just as easily drag and drop the art onto a page instantly with something like Adobe PageMill?

Unfortunately, this “do-it-the-easy-way” mentality became my greatest obstacle in this field of work, for as the Internet aged, people were learning more and more things they could get away with in web page design, and the consumer/surfer was expecting more with web page design. Thus, if you didn’t understand the “new stuff” from the skeleton up (i.e. the code), you were pretty much screwed until you taught yourself the new code, or you had to wait until an update came out for your WYSIWYG compiler.

Most new web technology has to be coded anyway. Hell, you have to have the latest version of your web browser to even experience some of this new technology!

So there I was, needing a job, seeing lots of “Web design guru needed” classified ads, but having limited skills to create pages. So I started to investigate the high-end, professional WYSIWYG web page generators that recently hit the scene, and decided to try Adobe’s GoLive 4.0. Originally known as GoLive’s CyberStudio, Adobe Systems bought out GoLive and released the software under their corporate name. I figured with my long history of pleasurable experiences with Adobe products, I couldn’t lose.

First, let’s talk System Requirements.

GoLive is different from the majority of the low-end, lower-cost WYSIWYG compilers out there on the market in that GoLive is a full Internet suite. Because it is such a full application (this application has a slew of high-end features), it requires a higher-end machine. GoLive requires a Power PC running Mac OS 8.0 or higher (bad news for all you folks out there getting by on 7.6.) For RAM, Adobe recommends 32 megabytes, however it will run with 24. I’m on a G3 with 160 megs of RAM, so I’m ready to go.

My First GoLive Site
My first thought in reviewing GoLive was to build a site that showcased all of GoLive’s features so that My Mac’s readers could go there and see how it looked and worked. But at the same time, I wanted to see how it handled the basic website as well. Necessity decided what I would build first: My friends and family outside of Maine wanted to see some new pictures of my daughter, so the first GoLive site I built was a “picture page” of her.

There are three ways to create your web pages in GoLive: WYSIWYG, tag-outline, and with straight-up code. I used WYSIWYG mode as this site was a basic one in which I’d be mainly dragging and dropping images onto the page.

Using GoLive was incredibly easy. I just dragged the photos onto my “page window” and dropped them where I wanted them. With a button click, the color palette popped up. I chose a background color, which I just dragged over to the “Page Inspector” window. POP-the background turned white. I hit SAVE, and posted it on the Internet! In less than an a half an hour, I had designed the page, posted it on the Internet, and had written an email to all of my loved ones to go check it out. That’s a quick job!

That was a very BASIC website. To properly review GoLive, I had to push it. I decided to go all out and created “WHY WE BUILD,” a completely freeform, experimental, artsy-fartsy site full of fun and games. Unfortunately, I’m the type of person who has so much fun developing content, that I have yet to post ANYTHING for you all to check out. However, the following is a review of the features I’m working with on this site.

WHY WE BUILD
The first thing I checked out with GoLive was “clickable image maps.” GoLive makes creating them easy! I had always coded image maps in the past, and it was kind of a pain (a rewarding pain, but time consuming all the same.) GoLive makes it a snap. You simply take your piece of art, and either draw boxes, ovals, or (and this is really cool) you can use the draw tool and create exact, bezier curve-type selections for hot spots in your art. Once a hot spot is defined, you type in the target URL in the “inspector window,” and you’re good to go. It’s too easy.

GoLive offers the designer out there quite a cool feature-Grids. Grids are basically what they say: you draw a box on your page, it fills with a boxed grid. What you get in using grids is a web page that in preview mode looks like a sheet of graph paper. You can draw overlapping grids to position your art and type in. This way, you can choose EXACTLY where you want things to flow on your page. This feature takes web page design and pushes it more towards print-page design.

Another wonderful feature for all you webmasters out there is that GoLive has CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. This alone is the greatest feature of the application (especially for those who are used to the production end of a print magazine wishing to switch over to a web version of the said magazine. Style sheets are a longtime MUST in magazine layout, but until now who the hell had that as a feature in a web design application??!!)

Creating forms is impossibly easy: you just drag over your buttons, text-input boxes, submit buttons, etc. onto your page. Hit the preview button, and you can try them out!

Adobe GoLive is also created to run very closely with Adobe Photoshop. I truly enjoyed the ease of use between the two applications. It’s nice to be able to double-click an image in a GoLive document and have it immediately open in Photoshop. Also, it’s nice to take a piece of art already placed in my GoLive document, alter it in Photoshop, and to have it refresh itself instantly in GoLive!

You can also easily add QuickTime Video, JavaScript, Frames, etc. to your site, simply by dragging the icons for those features right onto your page. There are a slew of other fantastic features in GoLive, but I haven’t even gotten to ’em yet!

DRAW BACKS
GoLive adds lots of extra code into its web pages. Now, this may not be a bother to all you out there just pumping out pages for fun, however I had to go in and clean out a bunch of code even for the basic website I did of my daughter. It’s just a wee tad too unclean for me to allow to be posted. GoLive also has some pretty hefty system requirements as well, especially for a web design application.

IN A NUT SHELL
I wish I had finished enough work on the site I am creating to post something for you to check out, as I’m having FUN with Adobe’s GoLive. It’s fast, stable, and incredibly easy to use. This is drag-and-drop the way it should be, while at the same time GoLive is a FULL web design application, of which, when used to its fullest, should impress anyone with the end-product. I can see myself becoming somewhat of a web-god with this product. I highly recommend it.

•Mike Gorman•

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