Choosing website design weapons
JACK KAPICA
Taking Adobe and Microsoft’s design and website-creation suites out for a spin is a lesson in the kind of arsenal required to create a modern, sophisticated site.
Expression Web is the first of four products intended to introduce Microsoft to the high-level graphics market, and offer competition to Adobe. And Adobe has incorporated Macromedia products into its Creative Suite packages involving its own redoubtable Photoshop, Illustrator and In Design. The critical one here is Flash, which Macromedia had been transforming from making simple animation into something more robust.
Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 Design Premium and Web Premium - CS3 for short - has more tweaks and improvements than you can count. The accomplishment is integrating the products into a seamless engine, and generating a common look and feel so they work together. CS3, in short, is less a revolution than a triumph of engineering choreography.
Faced with a plethora of products, Adobe has broken them down into three logical groups defined by the needs of professionals - Web, print and video post-production, and two subdivisions of each - standard and premium.
The strategy here is a wise one. Users accustomed to the individual products will not be mystified and alienated by CS3, and the common interface should ease them into the products they don’t know.
As for Microsoft, Expression Web has been built from the ground up as a replacement for its old Front Page website creation tool and will eventually include Expression Blend (blending Web and desktop, mixing video, vector art, text, animation, pixel images and 3-D content with “cinematic” user interfaces), Design (for editing both vector and bitmapped images) and Media (a way of managing your graphics assets).
Expression Web’s only real connection to other Microsoft products will be its familiarity to Office users, who will find the interface familiar.
For more info please visit: http://www.semaphore-software.com/web/web_design_multimedia.htm
