[Pro] Using Freeway

No serious problems at the moment, just wondering about Freeway and the ease of using it. I’m using it for approx 10 years now, struggled a lot but had also lots of joy for working with this fabulous programm. Thanx SP!

But what wonders me more and more, SP says on their site to promote FW:
“Create responsive websites. Visually.
Websites are visual, tactile, and tangible experiences. We believe creating them should be exactly the same.”
And… “Freeway7 - Create responsive websites on your Mac, without writing any code.”
All should be done easy and visually to let designers design their sites and not get hunged up in weird code…

But, most of the tips to solve problems here is to add, write, enhance, change… CODE! I know, if things go fine there isn’t the need of mentioning here. But it seems hat, without any knowledge of coding, your FW site has to be very simple or you have to switch to WordPress, Webydo, Rapidweaver etc.

I love FWTalk, I’m much obliged to Walter or Max who had helped me in weird situations. Its a great community.

But is Freeway getting too complicated these days?
I hope not but if I read all those daily struggles to get things done…

Well lets get back to work and stop wondering.


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On 29 Aug 2014, at 10:40, Andries Kuipers wrote:

But what wonders me more and more, SP says on their site to promote
FW:
“Create responsive websites. Visually.
Websites are visual, tactile, and tangible experiences. We believe
creating them should be exactly the same.”
And… “Freeway7 - Create responsive websites on your Mac, without
writing any code.”
All should be done easy and visually to let designers design their
sites and not get hunged up in weird code…

But, most of the tips to solve problems here is to add, write,
enhance, change… CODE!

Previously, building fully responsive sites using Freeway required some
significant awareness of code and often used code tricks to get there.
In Freeway 7, much of that is now part of the visual layout process.
However, many people still use Freeway 6, as 7 is pretty new.

Additionally, questions are often about integrating stuff such as
externally-made galleries, Facebook or Google+ buttons, and so on. If
someone has code they want to add to a Freeway visual layout that pretty
much has to involve discussions of where the code goes. :slight_smile:

Freeway is the best free-form visual web layout application, bar none.
Wordpress is astoundingly powerful, but it definitely is not a visual
layout tool. Rapidweaver and others of that ilk tread a kind of middle
ground between design and template-driven production. It’s a classic
case of ‘horses for courses’.

To achieve design goals in a particular media it’s useful to know
something about how that media works. Print designers won’t get far if
they don’t know anything about CMYK inks or the basics of paper – but
they don’t need to BE printers to create powerful, compelling, effective
design work. And they still can create workable designs, usually, even
if they are actually clueless about production.
Freeway makes this truism apply to web design as well: you’ll achieve
more if you know something about the technical aspects of how web
pages work. But you don’t need to be a programmer to create powerful,
compelling, effective web site designs.

As for whether it’s getting too complicated – well, what’s possible in
web production is constantly going up. I remember the good old/bad old
days of PageMill 1.0 and Freeway 1.0, and before. Boy, things were
simpler then! Well, in a sense, if you ignore the crude workarounds we
were constantly dreaming up. :slight_smile:

Sometimes I look at what the best of today’s software tools (Freeway,
LiveCode, Photoshop, After Effects, etc.) allow, and I marvel. I don’t
have a flying car but I truly am living in the future. We can’t stop
learning new things without falling behind, that’s a fact of life. The
trick is to keep enjoying it. :wink:

k


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Enjoying it is still present Keith. And you’re right about the visually attractiveness of FW and working from scratch. Thats why I’m still using it.

But I’m also jealous when seeing goodlooking modern responsive (WP) sites flying by with a CMS built in… and it took me hours and hours to get one page responsive in a fluid way… and add WYcms to it and praying that it works for my client also.

I want to design, I’d rather ‘build’ a site then code it. I’m using a lot of third party components who, after installing the code by Markup, works most of the time right of the box. I see results immediately, building sites is part of my living, if it takes too long I can’t charge my client for codestruggles.
I can ‘read’ some code, I know what it says and does or should do. But I can’t write it and rather won’t. Because I’m not writing Postscriptcode either to get a pentagonshape in Illustrator. I want to draw it and go further with designing.

So I hope dat SP will make more short videotuts, about how to make text, images, headers, footers etc responsive. I’m willing and eager to learn things, but my biggest pleasure is to design and build a site, not in heavily coding it.
So looking for new tricks is my goal… :wink:

A


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my opinion, too, andries!

sometimes i took hours to get things (inline, alignment etc.) right, struggling with extended code, divs etc. and with cms (web yep or plus or…) the things get more and more complicated.

i have to say, for these reasons i’ve switched to wordpress for some projects and i’m happy with it. i play with the design, again, and only with the design. i adjust templates and typo and finito … of course, wp has its own difficulties, you’ll have to learn how it works but you’re always “state of the art” with your cms and widgets.

i like freeway and i use it from the beginning … but with a lot of hours to get all things right. time, i would like to spend on design.

DD


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Thanx Dieter.

I love Freeway and I’ve made quite a few websites with it, also very complicated ones. Some went rather fast and sometimes it costs me many nights…
I also used Rapidweaver but found out that I was more time busy with de-templating the examples then building a new one haha.
But seriously, I’m willing to code a little, pasting, enhancing, chancing, but I can’t write it well. I’m very jealous on those guys who can! Its just not my cup of tea.

So as an answer to Thomas K, I want to spent some time on coding, but DON’T want to spoil my time with it. The only thing what my clients wants to pay for is what they see ON te screen, not whats all done behind.

So I’m very glad with actions, scripts, modules etc. And thanx for those smart guys who give me the chance to use that stuff. And last but not least, I’m gladly willing to pay for it because it saves me hours of nasty work.

A


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