Even since early Internet days, there has been no dearth of “easy website builders.” those who were around surely remember the likes of Geocities, Homestead (now an Intuit app), and even Microsoft’s FrontPage. but those all produced cookie-cutter looking sites. On the Mac side, Apple’s iWeb (part of the $49 iLife suite, 4.5 stars) filled that role, but now that that’s about to be discontinued, where to turn? Adobe offers one option—its just announced “Muse” product (it’s a codename). Muse allows a lot more design creativity than the earlier tools, and takes advantage of new HTML5 Web standards.
Getting Muse installed comes with a prerequisite: you need to have Adobe’s AIR runtime installed on your Windows or Mac PC. but not to worry, if you don’t, the setup program will install it. I installed on a MacBook Air and a 32-bit Windows 7 laptop without incident, and a 64-bit Windows 7 machine without issue. but its dependence on AIR made for a slower startup than a standard app. at startup, a welcome dialog asks you whether you want to begin a new site or open an existing one, but you can disable this dialog.
Muse breaks site creation down into four steps, each accessible from large buttons at the top of the window: Plan, Design, Preview, and Publish. in the first step, you simply create the site structure in a tree or flow-chart view. you link every page on the site, including “master” pages that serve as templates for sub-pages, which can include a common logo, header, and footer.
Double clicking a page’s thumbnail or hitting the Design button opens an InDesign-esque interface, in which you choose colors, enter text areas, and widgets. a toolbar along the top changes based on what you’ve selected–an image, text, or a box—and lets you add links, effects (like fill colors, strokes and drop shadows, and rounded corners). you can also specify opacity, glow, and bevel, or enter exact pixel sizes for page elements. a ruler surrounds the page area, letting designers see where an object lies in number of pixels from the edges. Objects you insert don’t snap to a grid, but guidelines show up to help you align them with others. the ruler and guides, as well as a grid overlay can all be turned off, so the interface has some degree of customizability already.
The design interface is similar to Microsoft Expression Web ($149, 4 stars), though that tool offers more brushes, shapes, and path options, but no widgets. Expression, iWeb and CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer also offer a healthy selection of templates to base your site on. Expression and CoffeeCup even offer galleries user-contributed templates, expanding the choice even further. hopefully Adobe will make such a clearinghouse available for Muse users.
Fidgeting with Widgets you can also insert widget code for objects such as menus, presentations, newsfeeds, menus, and tooltips, or insert HTML you find elsewhere. but there are too few included widgets: iWeb and other tools add widgets for things like YouTube videos, maps, and RSS feeds. and some of them, like the slideshow, aren’t so simple to figure out how to customize at first, though a small arrow pops out a dark menu for customizing widgets. By contrast, iWeb is geared towards inserting a slideshow only from MobileMe (soon to be iCloud)
The Preview feature uses Muse’s built-in WebKit browser rendering engine, so your work should look the same as it does in Safari and Chrome. I also tried viewing my test site in Internet Explorer 9, which worked fine after allowing script running. Firefox also displayed my none-too-professionally designed site perfectly.
Once your site is complete, from the Publish tab, you can have Adobe host a trial version for you to share with colleagues. doing this requires a simple signup for an Adobe Business Catalyst account. after the trial period, designers will be able to either pay Adobe to keep hosting the site, or gather up the generated HTML and CSS code and host it on another server. you can also export the code to HTML, but it makes use of scripts on Adobe’s site, but that’s standard practice, and means you don’t have to host the scripts yourself. I checked my site’s code with the W3C validator, and got the response, “This document was successfully checked as HTML5!”
When you want to move a site to your own host or domain, you can either export the (clean) HTML to your own server, or redirect your domain to the Adobe Business Catalyst site and pay Adobe for hosting. One thing you need to be careful about: when you publish a project to an existing site, that site will be overwritten with the current project. I erased a site I’d built on another computer this way.
Amusing, but is It Ready? Muse takes what-you-see-is-what-you-get Web page creation to a new level, but ,despite that, it’s still not ready to become your primary site building tool. It needs more templates, actually, some templates, and more active content. If you don’t have design chops, Muse is probably not for you. but it is an apt tool for the designer who doesn’t want to mess with the slightest bit of HTML. and we can certainly expect its evolution into a more powerful tool, since it’s still in beta, and hasn’t even been christened with a final name. I look forward to seeing what becomes of Muse when it’s released, but it’s definitely too early to assign it a PCMag rating.
More Web Publishing Software: • CoffeeCup Visual Site Designer• Kidlandia• Tweak.com• ClipTogether (Beta)• Adobe Dreamweaver CS5• more
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