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Advanced Page Making

PageMill 3.0, Part II

By Mike Kaltschnee

 

FIRST, if you haven't read Marlene Gaberel's review of PageMill elsewhere in this issue,, do it now. This article is meant to pick up where she leaves off, and may not make complete sense unless you get her insight first.

PageMill is a product I've owned since the beginning, literally. I bought one of the first copies at a trade show, and even paid the full retail price. I was very excited about a program that automatically wrote the Web page codes for you because I was doing it by hand. Before PageMill, I used Notepad and an HTML book (Laura LeMay's Learn HTML in 14 days). It was a laborious process, taking a lot of time to figure out the complicated commands like tables and frames. PageMill was supposed to save us from
ourselves.

PageMill 1.0 didn't exactly live up to its promise, but it was a great start. I even wrote one of my first reviews for DACS on PageMill several years ago. Adobe's come a long way with the product, and I'm even considering using the latest version for my personal page work. I like the interface; it's simple and intuitive. The commands I use most often are usually only two clicks away, and I had little trouble finding anything.

One thing to look for in an HTML editor is the code it writes, so I created a fairly complex page and viewed it in Notepad. The code PageMill writes is simple and easy to modify. The reason you should care about the code is that you will wind up "fixing" it at some point or another. No matter how good these tools are, I always find a bug or code that I have to modify for the page to work the way I want. Some HTML tools, like NetObjects Fusion or GoLive CyberStudio, write code that is too hard to update. They use tricks to create great-looking pages, but you can't update the code yourself.

Included with PageMill are several useful items. Adobe bundled PhotoShop LE, a simpler, easier-to-use version of PhotoShop. Most of us don't need all of the features of PhotoShop, or the price tag. PhotoShop LE is a great program, with all of the features you need to create and edit images for the Web. It also included a lot of Web images, templates, and even some Java programs you can add to your site. An advanced addition is O'Reilly's Website, a full-featured Webserver, enabling you to post your pages using your computer so anyone on the Internet can see them. If you're really an advanced user, they've included Perl scripts from Matt's Script Archive so you can add a guestbook and other features.

Adobe PageMill 3.0 Screen Shot.Site management is becoming more important as Web sites become larger. Adobe PageMill includes a simple site-management tool that is integrated nicely with the editor. It can help you find broken links, inside and outside of your site. This has got to be one of the worst chores in Web page creation, and PageMill has solved it. Another nice feature is being able to visually view the layout of your site and see just what is linked where. The biggest mistake most beginning Web designers make is to forget to spell-check, and the site manager can check the entire site at once. Very nice.

One thing I find missing in PageMill is "themes." NetObjects Fusion and Microsoft FrontPage both support graphical themes, which make it easy to test or change the look and feel of your Web site. PageMill does allow you to search and replace images, but if you're prototyping a site, themes make it much faster and easier.

My final recommendation is that PageMill is perfect for most people and businesses. You don't need an industrial strength Web editor to create your site, and PageMill is strong in every key area I explored. Best yet, it works on Macintosh and Windows computers (FrontPage Mac is not being updated past version 1.0, according to Microsoft).

The only real market issue with PageMill is the Microsoft reality. FrontPage '98 is a good, solid product, and with its marketing clout, Microsoft has sold more than a million copies to date. It's hard to compete with Microsoft, especially when they include FrontPage in the upcoming version of Office or Windows '98 (FrontPad is a "lite" version of FrontPage). But if anyone can compete, it's Adobe. By targeting their artistic customer base, they should do well.

I was going to put together a few quick pages as a demo, but I think this is a good way to plug our very own Web site, http://www.dacs.org. Another behind-the-scenes DACS member is Jeff Setaro. Jeff has taken over Jim Scheef's Web site project, and he's using PageMill. So, if you need an example of the power of PageMill, check out the DACS Web site.


Mike is a co-owner of DeMorgan Industries Corp., the leading developer of Web graphics, and also teaches Webmaster and Internet marketing classes at the Internet School in Naugatuck Valley Community Technology College. You can reach Mike at: mikek@demorgan.com.

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