Product Reviews

Softpress Freeway is a website layout application that brings desktop publishing paradigms to professional web design, and a public beta of Freeway 5 was released in January. Freeway works like QuarkXPress or InDesign rather than like Dreamweaver or GoLive, but because it is made specifically for web design it doesn't fall between two stools in the way that print layout tools with 'added web publishing tricks' do.

Freeway generates HTML, it doesn't edit it. Rather than trying to maintain the layout structure within the limits of HTML as you design, Freeway uses its own rich layout environment, one that will be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever used a professional layout program. You are free to move things about, crop and scale images, link text frames to flow content across complex layouts, and more - and you can add custom code in various ways, from simple markup objects to logic-driven 'actions'.

When you publish your work, Freeway generates the necessary code and graphics afresh, every time. The result is always-optimised, always-current code, even if you flip a page's output level from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Strict. The moment you republish, the web pages that Freeway generates from your layout will be updated completely. The downside of Freeway's approach is that you can't use it to edit an existing HTML site - although rebuilding it is generally quick and can lead to better code in the end.

One recurring hassle for traditional web designers is the need to build in appropriate programmatic fixes in order to 'persuade' some browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6, to behave correctly. These fixes change according to the kind of HTML standards used, what kind of graphics, plug-in media and so on, but Freeway's publishing engine creates output that works as expected across many browsers.

Some of the features new to Freeway 5 include high-speed CSS menu production, for creating drop-down or fly-out navigation schemes, and the ability to create templates for Blogger. There is a suite of Google actions, plugins that extend the application's abilities. This particular set makes it comparatively easy to add a customised Google map, Google analytics code and more to a page.

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you like Ajax-driven Web 2.0 tricks then the Scriptaculous suite of actions can be used to produce effects such as fading, 'concertina' layers that expand and contract, and so on. And in a very welcome move, accessibility design assistance is provided in Freeway's built-in preview display mode, with customisable view options to help you make the right design decisions.

Moving back to more general abilities, there's a dedicated iPhoto import feature in this new version that lets you browse the contents of your iPhoto library directly, album by album. Freeway could import from iPhoto by drag and drop already, but this integrated browsing window will help iPhoto users even more.

The scope of built-in graphic effects has been improved. Visual tricks such as shadows and glows and custom borders for graphic shapes have been rationalised, and non-graphic items can be given effects as well. For example, a drop shadow can be applied to HTML boxes (whether set to be published as divs or table code) and the published result will be whatever code and graphic structure is required to recreate the effect, complete with browser-specific fixes as required.

A lot of work has gone into handling parent-child CSS object structures, and you can make rich CSS-only layouts with interdependent element scaling and positional relationships. More importantly, these layouts can be easily created and modified by visually-orientated designers.

The public beta of Freeway 5 is an impressive step forward; it puts many of the latest web technologies into the hands of designers without demanding that they become coders as well. It will still be useful to have an appreciation for how these things generally work, but you can concentrate on design rather than concerning yourself with technical minutae.

There are rough spots in this first public beta that should be noted. For example, certain kinds of HTML lists don't behave correctly in the generated web code, and setting CSS items to have heights pinned to the page height doesn't work properly. Softpress has a Public Beta forum where problems are discussed, and it says these will be fixed before the final release.

This pre-release version is stable and fairly trouble-free. If you do hit a bug, you'll have to wait for a newer beta or the final 5.0 release for a cure, or hand-edit the code when you publish. But that's the nature of betas; the final version won't need such efforts.

Website design has come a long way very quickly, and the software needs to evolve to keep up, both to embrace new technologies and to make life easier for the users. Although dyed-in-the-wool programmers may not take to it, Freeway 5 looks like it could be the ideal tool for visual designers who want to create professional, dynamic sites without headaches.