Review:
Adobe GoLive 5.0
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by
Donald Herion
4 Geeks
In
a web editor world dominated by Dreamweaver and Frontpage, Adobe
GoLive has begun to make its presence felt. Built for the designer who wants
to design and not hand code HTML, GoLive has received a big facelift by Adobe.
Over 100 new features have been added for version 5.0. These improvements include
360code, improved table editing, accessing databases, an enhanced interactive
editor and more support for W3C standards and emerging technologies. But how does
it stack up against the competition?
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Screen Shot of Adobe GoLive Interface
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GoLive
Go
Similar to other WYSIWYG design programs, GoLive provides two windows
for creating web sites. The first is the 'Site Structure Window.' This window
gives designers complete access to the most used resources in the web site, including
files, external links, colors, fonts and more. The second is the 'Document Window.'
Here you create individual web pages using a WYSIWYG editor, access the source
code, create framesets and even preview the page without bringing up a browser.
A nice improvement over Dreamweaver where you need to open a browser to view the
completed page.
You
create a web page by simply dragging elements from the objects palette onto the
page itself. These can be images, text boxes, tables, form objects, and multimedia
elements like Shockwave and Quicktime. For those designers requiring pixel-level
accuracy a layout grid can be loaded on the page. This is very similar to the
feature offered by NetObjects Fusion. After placing elements on the page you can
edit them individually through the context-sensitive 'Inspector Palette.'
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Objects Palette
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Inspector Palette
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GoLive,
like Dreamweaver, empowers designers to drag pre-scripted actions like rollover
buttons, JavaScript and DHTML behaviors from the palette onto the page. This enables
designers to speed up the creative process. Like most web designers, I do not
want to spend valuable time hand coding when you can quickly drag and drop ready
made code into place.
Once
your web site has been built GoLive can check it for link errors and missing files.
After these errors are resolved you can upload the site using the traditional,
integrated FTP program or the new Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning extensions
to the HTTP Protocol.
