Mac Website Creation for the Common Mac User
If you have visited TCOM in the past, you’ll notice that the site has a new look. This is one of the reasons that there haven’t been any posts for the last week. My search for a way to build a new site has lead me to this sermonette.
As technological leader of The Church of Mac, I must admit that I am much stronger in some areas than in others. Although I have built my own websites, I absolutely do not consider myself a webmaster (In fact, I generally try to avoid terms with “master” in them altogether). My knowledge of HTML is rudimentary at best, so I have always depended on the kindness of WYSIWYG. Unfortunately, for Mac users like me, our choices are limited.
Of course, we have iWeb. iWeb, however has a couple of drawbacks. Firstly, of course, you need to either get iLife with a new Mac, or purchase it. Once you have it, iWeb is very simple to use, but not at all flexible and doesn’t play well with other web development tools. Compared to other webdev tools, iWeb is iMovie and everything else is Final Cut Pro or Express.
Having grown out of iWeb, I started learning GoLive CS2. It’s learning curve was pretty steep, but eventually I got the hang of dragging and dropping my way into building more advanced pages. I still didn’t know much about HTML, but at least I could look at the source code and get some idea of what GoLive was doing in the background.
Then, along came the Intel Macs, and all Windows© broke loose! I had read about the problems that people were having with GLCS2 with their new Mac, but I wasn’t having experiencing them on my MacBook…in the beginning. Then, GL started to crash. Constantly. Consistently. If I had had hair on my head before, I wouldn’t have had it now, because I would have pulled it all out.
I got my hands on a copy of GoLive 9, which is Intel-native. A little background here is called for. GoLive was originally made by Macromedia. When Adobe bought Macromedia, they now had two webdev apps; GoLive and their own Dreamweaver. They decided to let GoLive languish, releasing a final version, GoLive 9, which would never be upgraded.
Still, it was GoLive and I knew how to use it. So, I started doing the remodel of the site using GL9. GL9 was close enough to the previous version for me to do what I needed to do. It was obvious, however, that Adobe really wanted us to move to Dreamweaver. In fact, GL9 incorporated many DW elements without improving on the GL experience.
Then, GoLive 9 started to crash as well and there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth. GL9 would behave fairly well unless it did something like, say, try to CREATE A TEXT LINK!
So, I put the site up as well as I could and started to search for alternatives. A client contacted me about building her own site. She was in the same boat as I was; she needed something more that iWeb, but didn’t know anything about hand-coding a site.
In my search, I came across Freeway Pro, a web dev app from a UK company called Softpress. I had experiment with Freeway years ago, but I had less experience with websites then than I do now, so I downloaded an 30-day unlimited (nice!) trial version.
Frankly, I’m digging it. Here’s what I like about Freeway Pro:
- It’s stable. Has not crashed once yet.
- It uses a one-window format. Very handy on a smaller display. Also, there aren’t a million tool windows to deal with.
- For a fairly advanced app, it’s pretty intuitive. I built most of the site without looking at the instructions. And…
- …the included manual is great. Open it up in Preview and it’s easy to find the help that you are looking for.
- Freeway lets you create and manipulate graphics without using an external editor. Yes, Photoshop still comes in very handy, but for doing things like adding a drop shadow or rounding corners, Freeway can handle that for you.
- Freeway actions. Actions are like plug-ins that perform..uh…actions without having to know scripting. Doing things like adding Google Ads, making rollovers and inline frames is quick and easy. However, there are things that I want to be able to do that I just can’t figure out yet. If there is a Freeway Pro pro out there, please get in touch with me. I got money.
- As far as I can see, there is no way to look at your source code in Freeway. However, I can take a page that I have created and open it in GoLive 9 to see the code there.
Thanks to Freeway Pro, I was able to do all of what I wanted to do in GoLive and much more. My trial expires in a couple of weeks and I will cough up the $249 to purchase it.
If any of you are advanced web creators, or, if you are a neophyte like me, please let me know your thoughts on the state of web development on the Mac by chiming in on the chat post below. Also, let me know what you think of the new web design.
Dr. Bobby
