 If
you have read any of my recent articles on web development or have been
to my HTML class, you will know that one of the things I am constantly
harping on is that there is no one web development tool that can do the
whole job. I have tried most of them and have found shortcomings in all,
some more serious than others. GoLive is Adobe’s
entry in the web development arena. When Adobe demonstrated GoLive at the
April meeting, my first reaction was “Wow, this is really neat!” However,
I learned long ago that nothing works as well as it does when it is being
demonstrated by a salesman, so I thought I better try it out myself.
System Requirements
The minimum requirements are a 200MHz Pentium PC running Windows 98,
NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 3) or Windows 2000. RAM requirements are 48 Mb
for Windows 98, 64 Mb for NT or W2k. 60 Mb of hard drive space is needed
(or so the box says, it didn’t turn out that way). A Mac version is also
available.
Installation
Installation was quick and easy but not without complications. The
procedure took 15 minutes and used 67 Mb of space on the installation drive
and 10 Mb on the system drive. The installation reset all of my web associations
to IE, however, after about 3-4 reboots, the associations reverted back
to my original settings on their own, go figure.
The second step of the installation is to install the QuickTime media
player. This procedure took 8 minutes, 10 Mb of space on the installation
drive and 21 Mb on the system drive.
The required 60 Mb of disk space listed on box turned out to be
almost 110 Mb.
How well does it work?
One of the first things I noticed on opening GoLive is that a program
called AOM_MFC tried to bust my firewall and access the Internet. I figured
out later that it was the Adobe Online Manager that checks for updates,
see my comments on tech support below.
The next immediately obvious feature is that the program is a resource
hog. Simply opening the Alamo PC site uses up about half the available
system resources. When working for extended periods, it is frequently necessary
to shut things down to recover resources before continuing.
The work of building pages is mostly done by dragging icons from palettes
onto the page. The downside of this approach is that, with as many features
that are available in GoLive there are dozens of palettes that can obstruct
the view of the work area. The illustrations in the manual show all the
palettes neatly arraigned around the work window, in reality, I was never
able to accomplish this, especially since many of the palettes change size
as different components are activated in the work area.
Design Features
GoLive has a feature called the Layout Grid that places a sizable grid
over the work page to allow objects to be placed precisely on the page.
Examination of the generated HTML code shows that placement is achieved
by placing objects in a table using the row height and column width properties.
Some of the competitor’s products that I have looked at accomplish the
same result by embedding tables inside of tables, inside of tables... making
it almost impossible to come back later and make changes.
Stationary files and Components
It is frequently necessary to maintain a consistent appearance across
multiple pages. Some of the techniques use by GoLive to bring this about
include Stationary files and components. Stationary files are essentially
page templates that contain the page’s design elements so that you simply
need to plug in the content of each individual page. Editing the stationary
will change the design of all future pages using it but does not effect
pages already created from the template. Components are HTML elements (images,
text etc.) stored in a file that can be referenced by multiple other pages.
Editing components will update all documents using that component but only
at the local level. Uploading the changed component file will not effect
pages already on the server until all of those documents have also been
reposted. Both of these situations are better handled using style sheets
and SSI (Server
Side
Includes) since
changes will effect all referencing documents immediately, except that
not all servers will support SSI.
Tables
Tables are probably the most frequently used design element in HTML.
GoLive has all the same table building tools as every other HTML editor,
however GoLive has a few unique table editing tools that are really WOW!
First of all, rows or columns can be cut, copied and pasted. That may not
sound like a big thing, but when other editors will only allow copying
cell by cell, it’s a great feature. Another unique table feature is that
they can be sorted by row or column. This can be a great time saver when
indexing the reviews on the Alamo PC site.
Multimedia
GoLive includes plug-in support for Flash, QuickTime, Real and SVG.
MPG support is available only in the Mac version. GoLive also has a QuickTime
movie editor that gave me a bit of a problem at first. Once a movie is
loaded, you can open the time line window from the menu or the toolbar
to edit the movie. The problem was that I could not get the time line displayed
on the screen, even though the window menu showed that it was open. After
several tries and another trip to tech support, it turns out after the
time line is open, you have to cascade the windows before it can be seen.
Rollovers can be created with drag and drop, however, 3-state rollovers
do not work correctly, the ‘pushed’ state does not persist. You still need
to get into the background document to adjust the javascript.
GoLive has a feature that it calls a ‘Floating Box’ that adds a new
dimension to animation, it makes use of the little used DIVISION tag to
create layered documents. With precision positioning, you can move an element
within the document and with layering you can move them above or below
each other. See a demonstration
of this process. In this demo, the logo is placed on layer 2, the text
switches between layer 1 and 3 giving the appearance of circling around
the image.
Site Management Features
The site management tools in GoLive include a variety of views including
a physical view (directory structure) or logical view (hyperlink structure).
Maintaining the information to manage these features requires disk space,
fortunately, unlike some other products I’ve seen, GoLive stores this data
separate from the actual site documents. This creates a site that is cleaner
and easier to maintain.
When a file is moved or renamed, hyper-reference URLs in and out are
adjusted to reflect the change. This is a feature also found in some competitor’s
products, and just like the others, GoLive’s update feature doesn’t work
very well. When a document is moved to a new directory, the URLs in the
links into and out of the document are adjusted correctly. Unfortunately,
links are not the only URLs that can be in a document, images, for example,
are not updated. Only one document can be moved at a time. Attempting to
move multiple files will result in only one file being moved, but all will
be updated the same as if they had been moved. When a file or directory
is renamed, the updates work correctly, however, the file view of the site
will show both the old and new names, attempting to open an ‘old named’
file give a ‘File Not Found’ error.
What most impressed me when the product was demonstrated at the meeting
was that if the address in an email link is changed, it can be changed
for the same address throughout the site. As of yet I have not been able
to make that happen and have seen no reference to it in the literature.
The closest thing I have found is that the Search and Replace feature can
be set to search the entire site, including the HTML tags.
When importing an existing site, the instructions say that it will be
copied into the specified directory, when doing so, an error occurs saying
that the ‘home page is not in the specified folder’. The site needs
to be manually copied to the desired directory before importing.
Documentation
I’m one of those strange people that actually reads software manuals,
I usually scan through most of the manual before installing the software.
GoLive includes a 450 page printed manual that is very difficult to read.
It is very poorly organized with information on any particular topic scattered
throughout the book and not well indexed.
Tech Support
There is no telephone support available for any Adobe product. Email
support is available for a fee ranging from $20-25 per question.
For free assistance, Adobe’s website maintains a User-to-User Forum
where users discuss solutions they have found to problems encountered with
the software. I posted questions on the Forum about the problems I had
with the QuickTime time line window and the Online Manager mentioned above
and received a solution within a couple of hours.
Conclusion
Adobe GoLive is a powerful tool and the learning curve can be steep,
I do not recommend it for the beginning web designer. Despite its shortcomings,
GoLive will have a prominent place in my designer’s toolbox but not by
itself. It is still not the DO-ALL product that sales reps like to rant
about.
Availability
GoLive is available locally at CompUSA for $330. It can be obtained
directly from Adobe's website
for $284. It is also available as a version upgrade for $95 (for users
of version 3 or 4 or PageMill) or a competitive upgrade at $140 (for users
of DreamWeaver or FrontPage).
Mike
Bianchi is the Alamo PC Webmaster and a member of the Board of Directors. |
