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How to Deal with the Needs of the Modern Surfer Gone is the era when a site offering text and a few hyperlinks was enough to satisfy the average surfer. People expect a lot more from the web, not being truly happy unless they find a unified look, useful graphical interface, multimedia, and fast download time. Today's designer needs powerful tools for web development. Freeway 3.0 by SoftPress Systems Limited looks to fill this need. After spending some time with it, I believe that it's one of the best if not the best web authoring products on the market.
The Inspector palette enables you to change the attributes of an object, as well as making some commonly used menu commands easily available - and the palette itself changes depending on what type of object is selected. For example, if you select text, the Inspector palette will allow you assign the font, style, size, or to create a list with the selected text. If you choose a graphic, you can modify its position, format, whether it's dithered and more. I don't see the palettes as overriding the importance of the menu bar. Rather, the two work together to place the commands where they are best going to be used. There are other palettes that are very important as well. The Color palette lets you apply colors to text and graphic boxes and the background color. Freeway uses the 216 web safe scheme by default but you can use Apple's color picker to select any color that you want. The Style palette allows you to create a look to text that you want to use over and over again. So if you want all of the text to be Geneva size +1 you can set it there. Once set, you can change, with a simple click, to the style you want to use at any time. Other palettes that I'll describe later include the Site palette, Actions palette, and Frame palette.
Forms
Once you've created all of the form items, you need to define how the form works. As you can see in the Form Setup to the left, I have entered the information that was given to me by my ISP. By filling in the right information the form will work perfectly. I got the information by visiting my ISP's web site and then looking through its help center for making web sites. Everyone's ISP should have a similar section and if they don't you can email their support for the information.
Dealing with Frames Another commonly seen feature of web sites is frames. Some love them and some hate them but they are quite helpful for navigation if used properly. Freeway has a Frame palette that shows the current frame setup and which frame you are currently working in. All of Freeway's features work within frames. While frames can be difficult to work with, Freeway makes them as easy as I think it should be.
Templates? Forget That! I mentioned earlier that most web sites have repeating elements and Freeway uses something called Master pages to make these repeating elements easier to work with. They are something like templates but much more powerful. Let's say you want a graphic or a navigation bar on a certain number of pages. What you do is switch to the Master page and create the repeating elements that you want. Then every page you create that is based on that Master page will also include those elements. If you change the Master page later, every page based on that Master page will reflect those changes. Conversely, if you change a page that is based on a Master page the Master page will remain untouched. If you later make a page that you would like to be a Master page, all you need to do is select a menu command and instantly you have a new Master page. This is more powerful then you might think at first. Consider all of the sites that you've seen with a graphical navigation header and a bunch of ad banners in the same position on every page in the site. There will be no more copying of html code or having to change every page in your site when the navigation header changes. This really frees you to be more creative with how your site looks as a whole without worrying about growing pains once you decide that a renovation is necessary.
Keeping Track of Everything... Easily
Speaking of links, how do you make them anyway? Very simply by selecting the text or the picture that you want to be the link and selecting Hyperlink from the Edit menu or the globe at the bottom of the window. You are presented with a dialog box that lets you choose of the pages you have already made, an external link, or a new page. The status bar at the bottom tells you where the link goes when you select a link. To see all of the links going to and from a page, you use the Link Map. The picture to the (above right) shows the Link Map in action. Clicking on the dot to the right of each page's name will expand and show you all of the links from that page. All of the internal links will be shown with a page icon and all external links will have a little globe. I found that using these tools made keeping track of the pages in my site quite easy.
And Action! Freeway expands its power by the use of Actions. Some Actions work on the entire page and others work on items. For example, you can have background music, a pop-up window, a background image in a table, a picture to change when you put your cursor over it, and more. In fact, Freeway can directly interface with Filemaker Pro through the use of Actions. This way, it is relatively simple to add, retrieve, and edit data in a database and more. Because Actions are written in JavaScript or a simpler "XML-like" language, anyone with the proper skill can write Actions and Softpress' web site has user-created Actions for free download. Fortunately, all of the Actions come with documentation so you don't have to guess as to how to use them properly. Also, Freeway supports AppleScript, both in the application and in the Actions.
Conclusion Naturally I'm not going to be able to cover everything about Freeway in this review. There are just too many features to mention but the best thing is that Freeway isn't the kind of program where you have to read the manual before getting started. I started by putting some text and graphics in and then decided that I wanted to make a form. Then, I just pulled out the manual and followed the instructions. Pretty soon, I had a form on my web site. Using Freeway is like that in most instances. Everything is very intuitive, and I can only suggest that you download the demo from Softpress and take a look at the power of Freeway for yourself. Freeway can import existing websites too. So if you find you like it, you can just move all your work into it and never bother with that dratted HTML ever again.
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Title: Freeway
Website Designers often need to collect information from users, and for
this, they use forms. Fortunately, Freeway makes them very easy to implement.
All you need to do is insert a form item (Checkbox, Radio, Button, Text,
Menu) and use the Inspector palette (see how versatile that palette is?)
to change its behavior. You can change the text that appears in the form
item by default, make a submit button, and more.
