Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I have been wanting to get a website up for YEARS but was always intimidated by the software and having to learn html. Push finally came to shove and I decided to JUMP and get this program. I had thought about doing one of the 'freebie' template based offers but I am an artist and wanted ultimate control. Same thing goes with paying someone else to do it, I wanted the option to change it on a whim.
One thing I could NOT live without is a hard copy of the manual. You get it as a .pdf file and my friendly neighborhood print shop (Paradise Copies, Northampton) printed out back to back and bound it for about $14? INVALUABLE. The little book that comes with the CD-ROMs is also very helfpul for what it is and worth reading. There are also online tutorials.
My Mac is almost 5 years old (OS 10.4) but the program worked well except for a glitch in resizing graphics that should be fixed with the new update. I didn't want to update in the middle of my project. I ended up resizing through the drop down menu instead of with key strokes. It's not difficult to learn and works a lot like Illustrator. You draw an html box and type in it. You draw a graphic box and either import visuals (photos, little things you've created in Illustrator or Photoshop) OR you can do 'graphic text' with any of your fonts but whatever you type in this way is treated as a graphic and won't be picked up with search engines.
So far, I have only done one page things (my own is at figleef dot com) but for a quick and easy web presence, I could knock out something simple in a couple of hours. You certainly CAN do sites with more pages, I'm just lazy. Adding music was very easy. And 99% of the time, what I placed on the page is what showed up in the browser (you can check how it will look/act in a browser while you are working on it). I also chose different colors (outside of the 216) with the help of the sliders. I only touched the surface of what this little program can do. If you are pretty tech savvy, you'll probably REALLY be able to do more than I did.
The ONLY glitch was uploading it and that took a week of calls and emails to GoDaddy (where my hosting account is) and the Freeway Express USA office. I'm going to explain how to do it here, as I had to get JUST the right guy at GoDaddy to figure it out. I use Fetch to get into my hosting account. I have several websites so I had to click twice on the folder for the site to which I wanted to upload and THEN, 'PUT' the contents of the SITE folder. That's all. Just the stuff in the site folder. Seems simple now but it took EONS to figure this out as I was uploading the actual Freeway file (has a yellow circled f). Once we figured it out, it was super easy.
I do ramble don't I? Anyway, it's great and if I can figure it out, you can too. I have NOT tried any other software but did a lot of research before deciding on this one. Hope this helps someone struggling with wanting to make their own website and not being particularly techy.
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