Are there any Freeway users here that can comment on how the product compares to DreamWeaver and GoLive?

Four years ago I used it for everything. Now, it's so outdated, so behind the times, that it's a total joke. RapidWeaver using the BLOCKS plugin is much better than Freeway, and it doesn't crash every few minutes. The company is trying to sell yesterdays trash for $200. Absolutely ridiculous. And nothing has really changed since 2.0. Bug fixes and a handful of new features are not going to fix this product.

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Anonymous wrote:
Four years ago I used it for everything. Now, it's so outdated, so behind the times, that it's a total joke. RapidWeaver using the BLOCKS plugin is much better than Freeway, and it doesn't crash every few minutes. The company is trying to sell yesterdays trash for $200. Absolutely ridiculous. And nothing has really changed since 2.0. Bug fixes and a handful of new features are not going to fix this product.

Thanks for the response.

I am fixing to get ready to upgrade CS2 and trying to decide if I want to choose the package that includes DreamWeaver. I have tried the DreamWeaver demo and it seems to be a giant leap backwards in terms of interface, drag and drop, and some other things. I have been using GoLive since the CyberStudio days, before Adobe, and of course are quite comfortable with the program, bugs not withstanding.

I will take a look at RapidWeaver, thanks again

I used it back in Mac OS 9 day for small "brochure" type sites and it was quick and easy to get a site laid out and uploaded, especially if you are used to using page layout products such as Quark.

It was stable for me for the most part. But I haven't used it since version 3.5. Would I buy it today over DreamWeaver? No, but if I was just going to tinker around with making personal sites... maybe.

Last I used Freeway was about 1 year ago with one of the upgrades to version 4.

To be honest, the program is just not good enough to use professionally. If it was under $100 (US) or close to there it would be a steal. Charging more than that is atrocious.

Last I saw (and a deal-breaker for me), you STILL could not use CSS ID's because Freeway itself used ID's in its own code. Man there were all kinds of arcane workarounds for adding styles to your stylesheet. It was crazy.

Not to mention that the code was way too verbose. And of course, you can't work with the code directly, as Freeway GENERATES code, it does not understand HTML itself. That's not good enough for professional use.

The whole paradigm (design without knowing code) is just not good in the first place. The users on the message boards proudly trumpet the fact that they don't know any code, and become upset when they have to view or learn any code. There would be posts with *CODE WARNING!* in the subject so these people would not be offended by code. Hilarious.

You don't want any part of a program where its users are proud of remaining ignorant about how the web works.

That said there were some real geniuses on the lists. I still haven't figured out why they use Freeway. If you must use a WYSIWYG, use Dreamweaver, you'll have much more access to code and much wider user-base to get help from, and finally, a paradigm that actually works.

I don't understand how a web site creation tool that creates standard-compliant sites is "outdated."

Whenever there is a crash, it can be traced to bad fonts or bad resources. And Softpress support is top-notch.

I am one of many web developers who uses Freeway to develop professional sites that are as good or better than anything out there.

Why not go to the web site and download the free trial and see for yourself?

Us "geniuses" use Freeway because we want an application that gets out of the way when dealing with layout and design. And Freeway's code is about as efficient as you can get. There is no verbosity. Run the code it generates through a tester, and you'll find very little if any excess.

To insist that people HAVE to know HTML to do web design is as silly as saying people have to know Postscript to print.

I've been using Freeway for over ten years, and sometimes really have to wonder what it is people are expecting. You can't compare Freeway to any other application on the market, because all of the WYSIWYG apps out there are simply a "wizzy" front end to a glorified text editor.

Freeway doesn't work in HTML. It only writes it -- really, really well.

When you design in Freeway, you are moving around objects on the pages of your site, just as you would in a professional page layout application. Because that's what it is. When you publish your site, Freeway writes beautiful layout code, generates any JavaScript or CSS you might also need, optimizes the photos, handles all the plug-in business for you, etc.

There's really no comparison.

You can work in your layout with 300 ppi Photoshop (layered) images, scale them, crop them, composite them with full transparency, and then when you publish, you get a Web-friendly compressed image at the size and scale you choose. You can also work with pre-optimized images and keep Freeway from doing anything to them (pass-through mode).

You can generate sophisticated JavaScript effects without writing any code by hand. And if you move an extended object from one page to another, all of the code comes along with it.

You can automate complex design and programming tasks with Actions. The syntax is a mixture of JavaScript and XML, and is pretty easy to write. There is also a thriving community of third-party Action authors if you don't want to do it yourself.

You can do amazing, impossible HTML layouts all day long, without ever cracking a code reference or resorting to hacks, and every time you change a layout, the entire page code is thrown out and re-calculated, always looking for the most efficient structure possible.

If you come to Freeway expecting it to be like Dreamweaver, then you will no doubt be disappointed. But Freeway has as much in common with Dreamwaver as say, Adobe InDesign has with Microsoft Word. Sure, you can use them interchangeably -- up to a point. But if you want to do precision work, at a level of visual sophistication far beyond the average supermarket flyer, then you will have to use the right tool for the job.

I made the switch from Dreamweaver to Freeway a few months ago and haven't looked back since. I run a company website designed in Freeway and one of the biggest benefits behind my reluctance to endorse Dreamweaver is the quality of the code that is generated by Freeway, it's ironclad. Weaver has been around too long to excuse the holes and errors that come up in the HTML it creates. You want proof? Subject any website that hints that it might have been made with Weaver to an HTML Markup Validation Check (validator.w3.org) and see how many errors come up. For example, www.dreamweaver.com (which routes you to adobes page) has 24 errors throughout its main page! Now try www.softpress.com..."0" found. As for the "other" weaver, Rapidweaver, is great if you want a replacement for iWeb. It's completely template driven and doesn't give me the flexibility of customization that I need. If you design pages on a Mac, go for Freeway, its by far the best choice.