[Pro] Need help with workflow...

Greetings, all…

Was hoping to get some insight from some of you folks about a better way to manage my development workflow.

Because I am not using Freeway on a daily basis, just intensely for a few weeks at a time to complete a project, I don’t yet have a good work flow for keeping track of my site elements. Here is what I’m doing, and a current problem I’m experiencing.

Let’s say I put together a site called “Bob’s Bicycles.” On my desktop, I accumulate the graphic elements that I’ll use throughout the site and put the elements in a folder. As I create my pages, I’ll insert the images into the pages, publish and upload the site and make changes until everyone is happy.

The problem (I think) is that Freeway remembers the folder on the desktop where the images were originally pulled from. But later, when cleaning up my desktop, I’ll move that folder somewhere else, and a month or two later when editing the site again, I go to publish and get the errors stating that Freeway can’t find the files. I then go in and point back to the NEW location where I moved the files, until everything is happy again.

This time, unfortunately, I had to recover from a hard drive crash and I lost some of the graphics. When I load the website, I can edit it, seeing all the page elements and graphic files in the site itself, but when I go to publish it, I get errors for all the files Freeway can’t locate. In this particular case, there are a lot of them due to the crash. At some point I was careless and deleted my backup. Yeah, it was stupid, but here I am.

Is there any way I can tell Freeway to export or save all of the files that are already in the site file so that I won’t get the publish errors?

If I look in the resource folder for the site it appears that Freeway truncated the original file names of the graphics to a certain number of characters and then added A, B, C, etc., to the file names. This sucks because I have so many files with similar names where the end of the file had the identifying part of the name; i.e. ‘redflowersummer_rose,’ etc.

I guess ultimately, I’m looking for a better way of storing that initial folder of graphics for each of the sites I work on after the site is created, to prevent this kind of problem in the future. But also, I now have a few hundred graphic elements that I have to sort and reattach one by one to the original site.

I hope this makes sense.

Thanks for any help.

Ron


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I guess as a follow up, can I just select “detach graphics?” I’m afraid to choose that as I am not quite sure what that option does and I don’t want to mess up the website.

Ron


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What I recommend you do is to use the Save Archive feature in Freeway before you move your finished project somewhere for safe-keeping. That will gather copies of all of the images and so forth together into a Media folder for you, and then you can store that archive and know you have everything you need. It also creates a copy of the original Freeway document that “knows” about those files in the Media folder.

Walter

On Jun 12, 2012, at 6:42 PM, Ron Jaffe wrote:

I guess as a follow up, can I just select “detach graphics?” I’m afraid to choose that as I am not quite sure what that option does and I don’t want to mess up the website.

Ron


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Hi Ron,
I can sympathise with your plight as I too used to throw stuff on the desktop while in the throws of putting a site together. Try and get into the habit of starting your sites using either a built in template (most likely the blank one) which will create an organised folder structure for you in the Finder or construct something yourself that you’re happy working with. If you use a template Freeway will create a Media folder in your project folder. If you place files in here before you import them into Freeway you should be in a much better state.

As Walter mentions saving an archive (File > Save Archive) will do this for you but will duplicate (rather than move) the files.

Another handy hint is to drag the media folder for a current project into the Places section of the Finder’s sidebar or into the toolbar so you’ll have easy access to it while working on your files.

Lastly it is worth considering all of the resources that make up your site when archiving your project. There is nothing worse than having to hunt around looking for files that you’ve failed to archive months or even years after you last worked on a project. You may want to add folders into your archive for fonts, Actions, as well as supporting files that freeway may not know about like PSDs or Illustrator files.

Regards,
Tim.

On 12 Jun 2012, at 23:42, Ron Jaffe wrote:

I guess as a follow up, can I just select “detach graphics?” I’m afraid to choose that as I am not quite sure what that option does and I don’t want to mess up the website.


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What I noticed is that if I immediately go into a creative mode, figure basic things out in the design process, put my images everywhere and fix issues afterwards, I’m much less productive.

By preparing myself in a proper way there is a time to be organized and afterwards there is time to be creative.

I always use one basic folder where all my websites are stored. Of course this is a folder backupped by TimeMachine.

In that folder I have the folders with all my projects (websites). In that project folder I start with new folders called Documents, Media, Site Folder and Website.

In Documents I store the website details (ftp, login, email, database settings) but also text files containing htaccess files, for example a list of websites I used for information or resources or fonts I use.

In Media I store all my image files (tif, jpg, png, psd, ai etc).

Site Folder is the folder Freeway Publishes the website in to preview.

Website is the folder that I actually store the Freeway file in.

Then I start to do my research on internet. What colors, what fonts, what images, request permission for the images, gather textual information etc.

Then I start to sketch the website, think about the pages I want to make, build a wireframe in Photoshop etc.

Then I start to think of the page names, meta tags, keywords, SEO, write text, h1 tags, density etc.

Start up Freeway and start the actual website, make the colors, build the text styles, make the pages, make my Master Page(s) etc.

And then I let myself sliding into the creative mode.

Maybe this website can help you a bit in getting your organisation on track: http://lite.launchlist.net/


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