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FEBRUARY 25, 2004 Adobe GoLive CS
Site planning and maintenance GoLive CS also sports an array of tools to aid in planning, prototyping, and maintaining your sites. First up is the site feature (fig. 13), which consolidates all of your site's assets, from files and images to Smart Objects and even external links, into a single place. Of course, everything is accessible through double-clicking in the site window, and, as you might expect, you can drag/drop/point at things like images and links in a snap (fig. 14) should you opt to manage your site this way. GoLive is equally capable of just messing with pages on an individual basis as well, so if you're just working with a page or two at a time you'll still be in good shape.[an error occurred while processing this directive]  Fig. 13: GoLive's Site window.  Fig. 14: The ubiquitous Adobe pickwhip comes in handy here as well. Another feature that might come in handy is GoLive's diagramming capabilities (fig. 15). You can plan out site maps, information architecture, and technology requirements right from within GoLive, add annotations, notes, etc., and then save the results out as a PDF or SVG document to pass around. Once you've got your site set, you can then submit the diagram to GoLive, which will actually create all the pages and elements for your site. Complicated, but also pretty powerful and kinda sorta cool to boot, if you're into that kind of planning stuff.  Fig. 15: A fascinating diagram, as generated by the diagramming feature. The last thing I'll mention here is that GoLive CS adds a new Co-Author mode, which is a publishing workflow that allows designers to create site templates with editable sections that, in a nutshell, don't permit content editors to break the design when trying to update the site. The designer uses GoLive CS to set up the pages and their editable regions, and then the editor uses a stripped-down version of GoLive (called, ingeniously, GoLive Co-Author) to create or edit pages based on the approved template(s) and then publish them to a Web server. Standards-friendly A lot of Web designers have caught the standards bug, and it's not hard to see why. There's a whole heckuva lot to like about standards-based site design, which I've written a whole 'nother column on earlier so we don't have to rehash that now. The bottom line is that if you're into standards, you'll be generally pleased with what GoLive has to offer in that department. GoLive embraces a boatload of W3C-approved standards, including regular ol' HTML, XHTML, XML, and even SVG, for cripes' sake (fig. 16), but CSS is the "big one" here. GoLive integrates CSS authoring in a variety of ways, starting with the CSS Editor (fig. 17). The CSS Editor lets you manage both internal and external style sheets, and it's super-easy for novices and pros alike. If you're new to CSS, GoLive provides a complete GUI interface to the CSS spec, all the while giving you live previewing of your current style (fig. 18). For those already familiar with CSS, it's still nice to have a GUI to save you from syntax and property "dis-remembrances" while still having one-click access to the source code for tweaks (fig. 19). And, like the Source Editor, GoLive's CSS Editor lets you choose how the CSS gets formatted so it's in tune with any existing formatting style you may be used to.  Fig. 16: So many standards to choose from, and even more that you don't see here.  Fig. 17: Making CSS simple: GoLive's CSS Editor.  Fig. 18: Editing a CSS document is done through a simple GUI, with a live preview thrown in for kicks.  Fig. 19: Or, code by hand in the source view. Prev 1 2 3 4 5 Next Related sites: • AV Video • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Digital Producer • Digital Webcast • Presentation Master • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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