Adobe GoLive 5.0

There are two main website design suites for the serious developer market, Dreamweaver from Macromedia and Adobe's GoLive. While the Macromedia products have the major part of the market, it's by no means set in stone that they will hold it. GoLive aims to cover most of the bases in website design, from laying out the pages, to modelling the entire site and linking pages to back-room databases and other data sources. It can be seen as a 'grown-up' version of PageMill, with extra facilities for ecommerce and dynamic websites.

Adobe has deliberately made the GoLive interface similar, where possible, to those of Photoshop and Illustrator, and this is fine if you know these programs. For many, though, the multiplicity of separate palettes and dialogs makes the program less than intuitive.

In GoLive, this problem is exacerbated by the many different views of the page that it offers. While they all have their uses, it can be confusing to pick your way through layout, frame, source code, outline and preview views. Once you understand what they're for, though, it gives unparalleled flexibility for designer and developer alike.

In layout view, construction of individual pages is simply a case of dragging and dropping predesigned items and adding text, rules and simple graphics using the built-in drawing tools. This is much like a regular DTP program, such as PageMaker, and anybody used to working with page layout software will find it straightforward.

Frame view lets you design and adjust independent frames on a page, and outline view shows the hierarchy of objects on a page. The source code view shows the HTML code behind your page and can be edited directly to place the final tweaks in the script. Preview saves you having to flip between GoLive and a web browser to view the results of your work. You can keep several of these view windows open at once to see how your design is going.

Compatibility is one of the major requirements for a web authoring tool in a market still to find accepted standards for animation and scripting. GoLive 5.0 is happy with HTML, of course, and you can shift HTML scripts in and out of the application for editing in separate HTML editors. It's also compliant with Java in both Sun's JavaScript and Microsoft JScript formats, and handles Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), two new technologies.

Rival formats jostle for position in animation and video playback. GoLive can incorporate Macromedia Flash, Apple QuickTime and Real G2 formats by simply dragging and dropping objects onto a web page. Basic editing of streaming media is available, using a simple timeline to place objects in relation to each other. These media formats don't have the same level of integration as those from other Adobe applications, though.

If you're incorporating images from Photoshop or Illustrator, or animations from LiveMotion, you can choose to 'Edit Original' and move directly to the appropriate application to touch-up an object. You'll need a fairly powerful PC (more than the recommended minimum of a Pentium 200) to move in this way but, given that, this interoperability should increase productivity. The integration of Adobe products in GoLive goes much further than the interlinking of Macromedia's Flash and FreeHand, which is restricted to file exchange.

GoLive 5.0 is designed both for site developers, who lay down the overall map of a site, and designers, who may create the look of the site on a page-by-page basis, or lay down a template onto which information is overlaid. This second approach is a good way of giving a site a consistent feel, just as layout grids tie pages together in a paper document.

This dual-use approach does make the program a bit of an uphill struggle if you're coming to it as a beginner, for whom PageMill is a better option. It's much more a tool for the experienced amateur or semi-professional site developer. For those who need the extra facilities, though, you'll find it a comprehensive program that can handle most tasks necessary to construct a professional website.

Contact
Adobe 020 8606 4001 www.adobe.com