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Unlike the graphic design marketplace, where Adobe Systems Inc. faces little competition for its Photoshop and Illustrator apps, the Web design software battleground is much more fierce.

Macromedia Inc.’s Dreamweaver, for example, has always been a strong contender. The app boasts some of the cleanest automated code of any mass-market software package.

Microsoft Corp.’s FrontPage, meantime, is a familiar tool in the corporate environment, due to its document management capabilities and tight integration with Word and the rest of the Office suite.

Adobe’s GoLlive also offered tight integration with the rest of Adobe’s publishing suite. But the app also yielded something not as tight: messy code. Anyone who had to manually clean up the spaghetti code from early versions of GoLive is probably a prime candidate to switch to Macromedia’s Dreamweaver.

So how does this latest version, GoLive CS, stack up against the competition?

Web designers have always had to maneuver the Internet’s complex creation and management requirements. Web sites consist of many different files and formats that are knitted together, often at browse-time.

Palette overload

It’s therefore a daunting task for a software designer such as Macromedia or Adobe to make a Web design app comprehensive without it becoming overwhelming.

That battle becomes evident right away upon opening GoLive.

Although it parallels the look and feel of other Adobe apps, it still remains slightly schizophrenic. To its credit, the program presents options to display as little or as much information on the screen as the user wants. If you “max it out,” you are potentially faced with as many as 28 different windowpanes of information, not even counting the main composition windows.

Large screen needed

As a result, GoLive demands a large screen size and high-resolution settings - even more than some pure graphic design programs do - if you don’t want to be constantly switching windowpanes on and off.

Screen real estate can be precious in GoLive CS. The layout window toggles from design mode to source code mode, and source code can also be displayed continuously in a separate window.
Photo: Adobe

The switchable windows work well and parallel the other Adobe CS Suite products. The program falls down, however, in the frankly inscrutable array of tiny icons that populate a horizontal bar on the left.

The icons are confusing and don’t really get much more intuitive with time. We almost always had to let the cursor hang over any given icon for a few seconds until we were rescued by the “sticky” pop-up that ultimately identified its function.

This toolbar also yielded some other workflow idiosyncrasies.

For example, in most other Web design applications, to insert a picture onto a page, users merely would select a menu item such as “insert” and then directly put a GIF, JPEG or PNG on the page.

Using GoLive, users have to select a “picture object,” insert that placeholder onto the page, then click on the icon and specify the object information.

We suspect this extra step comes from some of the extra integration with GoLive and other Adobe apps that allows cross-app updating of content automatically, but it’s somewhat of a pain when all you want to do is place a series of images quickly.

Automatic updates, better integration

GoLive’s best trick is its continued integration with other Adobe CS components such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat.

In fact, if you’re a heavy user of Adobe’s other graphic design programs and want to do more Web design, this compelling feature alone might be strong enough to outweigh some of the other drawbacks.

The apps’ integration lets users easily switch from one tool to another. A designer could, for example, use a picture object to directly place a Photoshop document (PSD) into a GoLive page.

This in turn automatically engages the ImageReady component of Photoshop and the optimized picture is then saved into the appropriate Web folder of GoLive  (usually on a local machine until it’s uploaded to the staging or live server).

If that picture is subsequently altered in Photoshop and GoLive is active as an application, the change ripples automatically through GoLive with the same optimization settings that the previous file possessed.

If GoLive isn’t open, the change would take place the next time it is activated.

As you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of behind-the-scenes file writing and exchanging going on to accomplish all this, but to the user, it’s quite seamless.

Meshes with InDesign

Not only does GoLive mesh with Photoshop and Illustrator, its integration with InDesign CS has improved considerably.

InDesign now has a dedicated command called “Package for GoLive.”

This creates a PDF ready for import into GoLive, where all the XML will be available as text and graphics ready for optimization in the ImageReady engine.

If an already-existing cascading style sheets (CSS) style exists in the site design, text can be mapped to it, or if one does not exist, new Web styles can be created automatically based on the styles contained in the print document.

As with Photoshop and Illustrator, changes made to the original InDesign document are automatically reflected in the Web documents.

Typically, some degree of manual intervention will be required if the document layout or length changes dramatically.

One capability Adobe touts heavily when promoting GoLive is the ability to work with PDFs, and especially the program’s capability to create them.

This feature seems somewhat dubious, however, if you consider that the ultimate goal of a Web document is to appear in a browser and reach as many people as possible.

Creating a PDF of a Web page and posting it appears to be an extra (and unneeded) step that would complicate Internet workflow, not enhance it. This could be one of those features that Adobe builds into an application because it can and not necessarily because of a need.

Sometimes it’s the little things

Other features within GoLive are small, but impressive in their own right.

The “zoom” control in particular has long been a function in other graphic arts programs, and now it comes to GoLive.

When using techniques to pixel-position graphics in precise grids, it’s a nice feature to have. Naturally, raster images quickly become blurry, but the vector HTML text stays crisp even at large zoom factors.

The way users can toggle the main composition window between layout and HTML view is slick, and performance when switching is extremely good. You can also set up a secondary window to continuously display the code - a very good idea obviously borrowed from Dreamweaver.

The array of tools available for working with content in a mobile wireless access protocol, or WAP environment is impressive as well.

GoLive features a compatibility tester with an actual array of phone models, represented by photo-realistic icons, which lets users check to make sure content is accurately displayed model by model.

A feature called “live rendering,” meanwhile, is potentially useful if a designer is making a series of small, delicate changes to a layout.

It launches a limited-function browser window that effectively and immediately reflects changes made in layout view, without having to continuously refresh.

On PCs, the rendering engine is based on Internet Explorer, while on Macs it’s based on Opera. Opera’s open source roots make the app more up-to-date than IE, but its rather limited deployment makes its utility debatable.

In conclusion, the latest version of GoLive surprises with its robust feature set and clean code output.

The program is somewhat let down by its sometimes-confusing layout and overload of screens, but you can’t knock it for a lack of features.

A large or dual-screen monitor setup is highly recommended.

The inclusion of the app in the CS Suite will no doubt expose GoLive to a larger set of users who will buy the package primarily for Photoshop and Illustrator.

For Adobe, the challenge will be persuading designers raised on Dreamweaver and other tools that switching is worth it.