While the Macintosh platform has always had Windows parity with the two pro web design programs, Dreamweaver and GoLive, it has suffered a lack in consumer level choices. For the very low end we now have RapidWeaver and iWeb and hopefully soon, Sandvox. In the middle ground where the small business has traditionally needed help, there is only one choice, Freeway. Or, that might be two choices offered by one company, if you consider the two versions of Freeway, Pro and Express to be different programs.

Softpress, the publisher of Freeway wants you to: “Quickly assemble exactly the site you want to see—without any need for hand coding.” And Freeway does insulate the design from the code. For an old hand coding freak like me, that is actually a bit uncomfortable. You see, Freeway does not build HTML pages. It creates Freeway pages that you can export to complete sites. Freeway reminds me a lot of a page layout program like Quark or InDesign and somewhat of a vector design program like Adobe Illustrator.

If you are happy working with any of the programs I just mentioned you will be comfortable with Freeway. If you want complete control of your code you won’t be. It’s that cut and dried. This is truly and fully a design application, unlike Dreamweaver, which is both a layout and a coding program.

As with Illustrator, you don’t first figure out tables or CSS div structure, you draw text or image boxes on the page then insert content. GoLive and Dreamweaver can do this too, but their direct layout tools seem very primitive compared to Freeway’s. You can even link text boxes to have text flow on as you might in InDesign. As you aren’t really working on a live web page, Freeway will take your designs and export them to HTML when you are done. This gives a designer a very different sense of what is possible than what we are used to in our traditional box oriented designs.

Inserting Flash or Quicktime is easy, Freeway takes care of the coding for you. As with Dreamweaver or GoLive, Freeway comes with a number of “actions” that make adding JavaScript events to your page easy. There are the expected rollover effects and form validation actions. Freeway also includes or makes it easy to work with PHP actions, too, for adding dynamic elements to your pages.

Actions aside, this is a designer’s tool, not one for coders. If you get excited by semantic markup, you will want to pass. It takes a commercial third party action to really get control of CSS and HTML.

The $99 version, Freeway Express has the core layout functionality but not the ability to add more actions to the program. What you get is what you get. The $249 Pro version is expandable and has enough features to warrant the increase in price. That puts it in the range of Microsoft Frontpage, though it is a different animal entirely.

I’m wondering who the audience for this program is other than print designers who want to knock out the occasional web site. Since it doesn’t optimize pages well for search engines, I can’t consider it a pro web design application. For the average small business, I would recommend using a content management system or even a blog. For the casual user, iWeb and RapidWeaver give a lot of the functionality of Freeway Express for a lot less money.

I suppose that if you have aspirations to design your site, not just run it, but actually design it, Freeway is a good choice. My web design snobbery will come out here as I say that most self designed sites look less than great. Still, if you really want to do it yourself Freeway is a well made program.

It incorporates some of the image handling functions that you would normally need a dedicated image edition program for. Freeway will let you drag and drop from iPhoto, iTunes, even Word. It will handle your file uploads. And it may give you a sense of satisfaction from creating your own website.

On the down side, Freeway is not good at editing existing sites. It is not a HTML editor. So your existing pages will have to be re-created in Freeway before you can work on them. Freeway makes it easy to create text that will expand out of its place if your visitor increases the font size. That text flow from box to box loses its flow when your pages are exported to HTML and text just fits. If the font size is enlarged as many of us boomers are tending to do when we don’t want to reach for our reading glasses, your pages can look real ugly, real fast. Use that feature with caution.

If you want to create your own web sites and don’t want to learn web design and don’t expect your pages to be search engine optimized, Freeway is a solid, stable and well thought out program. It really is good at what is is designed to do. My sense is that it is attending to last years needs for design heavy sites not next years needs for semantically correct, search engine friendly sites. It’s by far easier to use than Dreamweaver or GoLive but more work than keeping up a CMS or blog. You’ll have to decide if it is Baby Bear, just right, or off the mark by being neither fish nor foul.

publisher Softpress
Freeway Express $99
Freeway Pro $249
30 day free trial. You’ll have to try this one yourself to make a decision on its value.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Software Review, WYSIWYG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.