Adobe GoLive CS

What distinguishes GoLive from the competition is its design-intensive approach to creating high-impact web pages. In many ways this makes it a natural partner to Adobe's print-oriented apps, and experienced print designers will certainly feel at home with the Layout Grid concept that GoLive pioneered: familiar DTP-style textbox-based layouts are automatically converted to HTML table grids behind the scenes. The danger here is that the resulting code is inefficient and more experienced web designers will choose to work directly with tables or CSS-based layers. GoLive also provides rich CSS-based text formatting, though the implementation is confusing.

Page layout and text formatting take care of the bare bones of your design, but it's graphics that make them stand out. Naturally, Adobe is keen to use its vast experience here and does so via SmartObjects. Simply drop a Photoshop PSD or Illustrator AI file onto your page and GoLive automatically creates an optimised GIF or JPEG version of it. Resize or crop the placed SmartObject and GoLive automatically goes back to the original to repeat the process so ensuring maximum quality and efficiency. Further impact can be added through GoLive's comprehensive DHTML scripting and the program's advanced QuickTime movie-editing capabilities.

GoLive's emphasis is on rich visual design, an approach that it has inherited from its predecessors, but it also recognises the importance of coding. There are various capabilities to help you get your code right, including syntax-based colour coding, tag-aware find-and-replace, browser validation and, in the latest CS release, a syntax-aware completion engine. Almost all the boxes are ticked (apart from the crucial online tag-based references), and you could even make the case that GoLive offers the most advanced coding capabilities - after all, you can edit your page's HTML directly in the Source Code window, in a split Layout/Code view, in a special HTML Outline view, or a mix of the above.

Ultimately, though, the mix of approaches is itself confusing, which is typical of the program as a whole. With no less than 24 palettes, many with multiple tabs, there's a strong feeling of bloat about GoLive CS. A bit of workflow-based streamlining along Dreamweaver lines would go a long way. And the same can be said of the pages that GoLive produces. Adobe still needs to learn the crucial lesson of web design: less is more.