I’m sure reading the manual would have clued me in – but I’ve tested plenty of other programs whose design made it obvious how to set up a gallery without having to lunge for the help files.As always, Freeway offers desktop publishing–friendly tools for Web designers. It still worked better than Freeway Express’s actual photo gallery action, which just manifested a big, blank box. ![]() I would’ve had no idea how to do any of that if I hadn’t consulted Freeway Express’s clearly written, numbingly thorough help manual.Įven on a large monitor, Freeway Express’s phalanx of palettes seem to crowd out what you’re working on.īuilding that interactive photo gallery proved similarly obtuse, as I jumped back and forth between multiple Inspector tabs for multiple Actions applied to various stacks of elements. Instead, I had to create a text box, use poorly marked arrow buttons to indent some elements of the text into a bullet-pointed list, apply links to each item via a command hidden in the program’s menus, and apply the CSS Menu action to that list, and then style the menu’s appearance in one of the many obtrusive floating palettes that always seemed to hover over whatever part of the screen I needed to see. To make that CSS menu I mentioned, I couldn’t just select the “CSS Menu” action-one of Freeway Express’s army of interactive or specialized page elements, which can be expanded with downloads from the program’s online repository-and then build how I wanted it to look and where I wanted each link to go, as I could in other programs I’ve tested. Unfortunately, many of the more complex tasks I mentioned prove woefully unintuitive, thanks to an interface that hides a lot of key commands in menus, displays different options in different places without obvious clues to help you understand those distinctions, and demands you follow steps that seem more like programming workarounds than logical procedures. I also built a reasonably slick CSS dropdown menu, and followed the exhaustive tutorial in the instruction manual to construct an interactive photo gallery, complete with selectable thumbnails that displayed a larger image. Configuring the built-in, no-frills FTP to upload my files required only minimal fiddling with the settings. Though I wasn’t impressed with Freeway’s paltry, unappealing roster of standard fonts, I did appreciate its ability to create fully editable graphical text elements using any of my system fonts. Once you figure out how to use Freeway Express, you can actually accomplish some pretty nifty tricks. Once you know what you’re doing, you can create impressive results like this photo gallery-but it’ll require patience. Too often, you just get empty boxes with labels on them. ![]() As it is, the separation merely makes it harder for you to easily see how your site will look as you edit it. This might actually be a clever solution to avoid cluttering up clean code with layers of revisions, if that code were up to modern standards. It doesn’t actually generate the underlying HTML code until you preview your site. It lets you drag and drop elements onto your pages anywhere you want, sized however you prefer. It also lacks support for the responsive design technology that lets sites adjust their designs to fit various devices’ screen sizes.įreeway Express does an admittedly clever job of hiding these shortcomings at first. And except for a few odd elements here and there, it doesn’t fully support the HTML5 or CSS3 standards on which most modern sites are built. It relies on standard, space-hogging JavaScript for interactivity, rather than CSS or the sleeker and more versatile jQuery. It doesn’t even include an option for CSS layout. I explain this so you’ll fully understand when I tell you that Freeway Express uses table-based layouts. Though it’s hard to say exactly how long CSS has been the standard, “at least a half-decade” is an incredibly safe bet. In 1998, the earliest versions of CSS layout arrived, providing a cleaner, easier way to lay out page elements. ![]() It was a kludgy workaround for a problem HTML hadn’t yet solved, but it got the job done. In the early days of the web, designers used HTML tables as a framework for laying out sites. Freeway Express’s drag-and-drop ease belies the out-of-date code it creates.
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