Product Reviews

Creating Web pages has become a highly complicated business. Applications have been packed with features to satisfy site creators' needs. Unfortunately, this has led to the tools themselves becoming extremely complex, demanding at least as much technical expertise as creative ability. Which is why the new version of Freeway is a breath of fresh air.

SoftPress Freeway 2.0 is an industry-strength Web site creation tool to rival the likes of CyberStudio and Dreamweaver, while remaining as easy to use as a true DTP package. It works in a very similar way to QuarkXPress, the mainstay of graphic designers.

The interface follows the DTP convention of presenting pages on a 'pasteboard' background, and uses the familiar concept of object frames, which can hold text, graphics or, in some cases, both at the same time. Even the keyboard shortcuts are the same as those in QuarkXPress where appropriate.

Fortunately, SoftPress hasn't fallen into the trap of emulating a print-based layout tool too closely; while the basic interface is modelled on tried-and-tested concepts, the tools and features are designed specifically for online publishing needs. Anyone with page layout experience will find Freeway very easy to understand, yet it won't disappoint those with technical skills and serious Web publishing needs.

Freeway provides both standard HTML-style text and 'graphic text' controls. Graphic text is useful when you want to preserve typographic details, as it's created as a referenced image file when the page is exported. This opens up a whole range of formatting options, including access to any installed typefaces, and the kind of kerning and leading controls a serious designer expects.

The floating Inspector palette provides most of the standard controls for selected objects, from text and graphics to multimedia elements and whole pages. There's also a Colours palette which offers both a Web-safe array and a customisable list of colours, and a Styles palette for working with style sheets at character and paragraph level, and in both HTML/CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and true typographic levels. All available CSS text attributes can be applied along with the more regular styling, but CSS's crude word and letter spacing controls have wisely not been referred to as kerning.

Freeway's use of master pages encourages consistently good site design. Master page items can be applied and reapplied to existing pages, and individual items can be updated to reflect the master page item's settings and contents. Text boxes can be linked to flow text through a layout, creating new pages as and when required.

When text is added to an unlinked HTML text box and the result spills over the bottom of a page, Freeway can extend the height of that page as necessary. In addition, if a table is resized and projects past the right edge of a page, Freeway asks for permission to resize the page to suit. As each page in a document can be of a different size, this feature works well. In a related feature, text boxes and tables can be set to grow in width in the browser if necessary, or left as fixed-width items.

A Freeway document is effectively a complete site. Navigating between pages is done via a pop-up menu at the bottom of the document window or via a palette. Frameset Web pages can be constructed very easily, appearing as another page-style item in the document. A number of preset frame structures are included, but customising them or creating new ones is easy.

Version 2.0 can import a number of different graphics formats, including TIFF, PICT, PNG and QuickDraw GX. EPS images are also supported, but Freeway only uses the built-in preview rather than the EPS data. DTP-style image management controls allow updating and relinking to images, and all graphics are recreated as GIF, JPEG or PNG on export.

An optional on-screen preview of selected graphics options is provided before export, so users can see how different JPEG compression or GIF colour reduction settings will affect the final result. The file size in bytes is also shown as changes are made, and selected items can be exported independently of the whole page, so Freeway can be very useful for tweaking

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graphics for online use.

Unfortunately, Freeway isn't so good at previewing some forms of media. Animated GIFs simply show the first frame, and browser plug-in-reliant media, such as QuickTime movies, aren't displayed internally at all. A site can be previewed in a browser with a single keystroke, but this is still an area SoftPress needs to address. Another related weak point is the way the width and height of plug-in-reliant media aren't provided, so it's easy to accidentally crop a QuickTime or Flash movie incorrectly in the layout.

Any item or page can be given 'extended' attributes for adding custom HTML at any point, but, more importantly, Freeway 2.0 includes Actions, a clever way of extending the core application's abilities. Actions are used in a layout and produce custom chunks of HTML when a page or site is published. A number of ready-made Actions are supplied with Freeway. These cover embedding media, such as QuickTime movies and Flash and Director Shockwave files, with relevant options offered in the Inspector palette. Other Actions cover different types of JavaScript-controlled rollover buttons and 'slave images' (a form of remote-control image pop-up), and browser redirection code for handling obsolete browsers or frameset problems, as well as a configurable timed redirection.

Editing existing Actions or building your own is surprisingly easy. They're simply text files with HTML-like instructions inside. The manual includes a number of Action-writing tutorials from the most basic to quite sophisticated JavaScript generation. New Actions, such as FileMaker Pro database link generators, are being written by SoftPress and Freeway users. These can be downloaded from the SoftPress Web site. This should calm any fears of Freeway not being extensible or not allowing custom code generation.

Unlike the other leading Web site creation tools, Freeway doesn't work directly in HTML. It has its own file format and converts layouts to HTML on export, which makes it more flexible. When something which is impossible to achieve in HTML is attempted - overlapping text objects when working in basic HTML 3.2 mode, for instance - Freeway simply does the most appropriate action, which in this case would be to push the underlying text out of the way of the overlying object. Overlapped graphics are exported as a single combined image or, optionally, as a sliced-up composite.

Freeway 1.0 used invisible HTML tables to create controlled layouts. Version 2.0's new support for CSS2 layers provides more design-friendly possibilities, such as overlaying text on other objects, and more precise object positioning. Now the final page or site export can be in HTML 3.2 or 4.0 mode, or in a hybrid 3.2 and CSS-based format. This means Freeway places both sets of HTML coding into a single document, structured so a browser that can't handle CSS data will only see the 3.2 portion, and vice versa. The overall page size does increase with this option, but usually not by too much, and it does help provide the best results for both old and new browsers without forcing designers to create mirrored sets of their work in different formats.

Exported HTML can be structured in two basic ways. The 'more efficient' mode removes all extraneous space and return characters, leaving the code in one long line. The 'more readable' mode pads out the HTML tag structures with spaces and returns in a much more visually-friendly format. The HTML itself appears to be extremely clean and accurate, the coding is very professionally structured, and as Freeway only generates HTML by exporting from the layout document, there are absolutely no proprietary tags used.

Freeway doesn't provide site management features in the manner of CyberStudio or Dreamweaver, but this is because it works in such a different way. As the components of a site are created on export, it doesn't create the same headaches associated with managing site media during production. It does provide built-in FTP (and AppleShare-friendly File Transfer) upload controls, and will automatically compare files, ensuring new and updated elements of a site are updated and unnecessary items deleted.

Freeway 2.0 makes high-end Web page design surprisingly easy and intuitive, regardless of your level of technical expertise. And at £199, it's well priced for the power it offers, and users in the education sector get very impressive discounts. However, there are areas of the application which could do with some improvement, notably the approach to working with plug-in-based media, but it's the easiest way yet to create professional, cutting-edge Web sites. It may not please those who believe Web design should be left to the technical gurus, but those who just want to get on with the task of designing sites will love it.