EXCLUSIVES

WEB DESIGN PROGRAMS

Words by Stephen Cody

You can tell a true websmith by the bulging muscles in his fingers, built up from hours of pounding a keyboard. His brain can rapidly translate hundreds of lines of abstract code to a fully formatted website. He scoffs at the idea of dragging and dropping graphics. For him there is nothing more satisfying than firing up Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit 8.2 and drop-forging web pages. BBEdit, a Mac stalwart since its original release in 1993, is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Mac.

However, users not ready to devote themselves to a near monastic apprenticeship should look elsewhere.
Apple’s recently released iWeb, part of the iLife ’06 suite, is the complete opposite of BBEdit. Its emphasis is on graphic design and users can choose from a dozen website styles, each with six different page setups. Creating a website is a matter of dragging and dropping photos, movies, and podcasts. The program has the easiest blog maintenance regime for the Mac.

iWeb has two crippling problems. First, creating new designs is a greater challenge than creating a website from scratch in any other program. Not impossible, but damned near. Second, the program uses a coding format that would leave the most experienced BBEdit user scratching his head. If you’re hoping to use iWeb to create a commercial website that Google and other search engines can read and index, in the words of Tony Soprano, “fuhget about it.”

Adobe’s recent acquisition of Macromedia means that two of the most popular web design programs, Dreamweaver 8 and GoLive CS2, are now housed in the same stable. Both Dreamweaver and GoLive offer exhaustive lists of new features. GoLive interacts with other Creative Suite components, such as InDesign, and makes creating pages for viewing on small screens, like the Palm Treo, easy. Dreamweaver permits the uploading of content in the background and has streamlined the creation of cascading style sheets. However, both Dreamweaver and GoLive require users to be bi-polar: half web programmer and half web designer.

Freeway 4 Pro, from Softpress Systems, allows users to focus on design rather than coding. Designers who use InDesign or QuarkXPress, or even Apple’s Pages, will adapt easily to Freeway 4’s drag and drop interface. Experienced web designers can focus on the design of their site, while leaving the chore of generating the Extended HTML code to Freeway.

Although users cannot directly edit code within Freeway, they can add extended HTML tags and insert JavaScript. Graphic elements can easily be layered on top of each other with varying degrees of transparency. Any font on your system can be used to generate graphic headlines, a chore that requires a separate program with other web design software.
Freeway 4 Pro is available as a Universal binary and can be downloaded for $249, or in a box for $279. Competitive upgrades, as well as upgrades from prior versions, are available on the Softpress website <softpress.com>

Our iWard for best web design program goes to Softpress System’s Freeway 4 Pro.