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Jeff Pollard | Life Section Manager

Graphic By: Rachel Thomason In the Web design industry, there used to be two kinds of designers: The hard-core coders who could easily design a page by typing ONLY raw HTML code and the wanna-be coders, who normally used a graphical editor such as Microsoft Front Page. You used to be able to look at a person's code to distinguish if they knew their stuff or not. However, with the release of Adobe GoLive 4, it's gotten much harder to distinguish the HTML geeks from the HTML posers.

Because I learned how to make web pages from a computer science professor, I was never informed that there was an easier way to create complicated layouts on a page.

Adobe has made it unbelievably easy to integrate Java, JavaScript, CGI scripts, and much more into your next web page. If it were any easier, they'd be making the page for you.

I have to admit, I consider myself a proficient HTML coder, but once I started using GoLive, I had a hard time NOT using it. I'd highly suggest GoLive to any Web developer who is looking for a quick and efficient way to create interactive pages, manage complete sites, or is just tired of writing the code.

I know what some of you might be thinking: "But I HATE using Front Page and other graphical editors because they put lots of weird and useless code in my pages!" Well, rest assured, young geek: from my experiences using it, the only tag I've ever seen it automatically insert without asking were some harmless </P> tags. And while these tags may frustrate you a little, it's well worth it to have a page editor THIS powerful.

GoLive's greatest feature is that (like many HTML editor's these days) it allows the user to edit their pages in either a graphical view or source view. Let's face it: Creating a large table with multiple rows and columns is close to impossible to get perfect if you're trying to create the table by just writing the code. GoLive also features a "Preview" window so that you can get an idea what your page will look like in a browser.

One tool that has become a life saver for me while updating multiple pages on the same site with the same information is the ability to search and replace words in multiple files. For example, let's say you had inserted the sentence "I love my dog" in 25 pages and then realized that your pet was not a dog, but rather a cat. Instead of opening each page and manually changing the text, you could simply find and replace the word in all 25 pages.

Another wonderful feature of GoLive is its ability to work directly on the server through FTP. This allows you to save your work directly on the web server without having to map any drives or upload any files after they've been saved. Simply save the document by clicking the "save" icon, and the file is automatically saved on the server. This makes updating pages much faster and efficient, especially if you're updating multiple pages.

On a final note, if you're not convinced of GoLive's features, then look around you. Much of this design of Whim was created using GoLive. In addition, GoLive is the page creation tool of choice for Web administrators who created Radford's recently redesigned home page.


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Name: PeeR
Comments:
I'm still a big fan of Allaire's Homesite. Homesite gives me everything I need, and like GoLive, it doesn't add in the extra tags or anything. It's fully customizable, and lets programmers do what they do best how they do it best.

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