Relative page layout vs inline?

Freeway
1

I’m going to TRY and wrap my head around more complicated steps for my websites. I’ve been reading up on inline layout and, well, it sounds tricky for me. Too much like math, I’m afraid. And less flexibility than I’d like.

Now then, the relative page layout action (thus the excellent knowledge base article referenced in the link) makes me think that for the relatively uncomplicated sites I tend to do, this might be a wonderful gizmo and not too terribly complicated to learn.

I would much appreciate your thoughts!

Laura

http://www.softpress.com/kb/questions/238/Using+the+Relative+Page+Layout+Action+(Freeway+Pro+only)

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2

not too terribly complicated to learn

Nothing to learn with RPL.

Use layered boxes, make sure they don’t overlap, apply the action, preview.

At that point you may get something that misbehaves and you might need to adjust the overlap tolerances or apply the Remove from RPL action to it.

David

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3

RPL is easy, as long as you are working with a simple website. The moment you try and pull something off very complicated, odd things will begin to happen. If you only make a few small sites a year, I would recommend that you give the RPL action a really good try before taking the plunge and learning inline.

Inline is almost an entire departure from the “normal” method of creating websites in Freeway, but will pay off big dividends if it makes sense to invest the time in learning it. With inline construction and a good understanding of CSS, responsive is within reach!

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4

Given what you’ve said, I think my investment in time is best spent trying out relative page layout. From your comments I don’t see how it’s all that different from the standard way of making Freeway sites, but I gather it presents an advantage in keeping a site more flexible for changing font sizes, etc.

The inline method . . . well, it sounds like a serious beast to master, in which case I might as well move to Wordpress sites.

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5

The inline method . . . well, it sounds like a serious beast to master, in
which case I might as well move to Wordpress sites.

Do you mean develop Wordpress sites, or just let someone else’s template do
the work for you? Cuz, if the latter, then why are you using Freeway in the
first place?

As someone who develops both with Wordpress and FWP, Inline Layouts in
Freeway Pro is far, far easier. Many of the masters of Inline Layout
started off right where you are now - so, not that traumatic.

You are invited to try anytime
http://cssway.thebigerns.com/products/inline-basic-layout/

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6

I will check out your inline tutorial, Ernie, and thank you for that. But when I talk about Wordpress, yes, I’m talking about using someone else’s template so that I can focus more on content and less on spending “under the hood” time that’s increasingly necessary to achieve great design in Freeway — what used to be simple for me before web work became difficult to manage with changing standards, CSS, layout variations and so much more.

Again, this is from someone who has developed and maintained only the occasional website — all of which were appreciated by my clients and which worked well. I love what I could do in Freeway, but part of my love affair with the program was its ease of use. Now, it’s less easy and more demanding to do whiz-bang things. The learning curve grows harder and much more time-consuming to achieve what previously had been relatively easy. And I know that’s true in other web creation programs as well.

Mind you, I’m not saying I’m giving up on Freeway. What I am saying is that I really need to think about what will fill all of my needs most comfortably since I focus on other elements beyond web design in my freelance work.

Tough call, and yeah, I am struggling with it.

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7

Hi Laura,

I’m not promoting WP over FW or vice-versa, I’m sure you’ll pick the tool that suits you and the job. What I do want say - and it’s well-worth considering - is that while WP will allow you to get up and running fast, no question, if/when your client wants to change the layout you will find that doing so will require a steeper learning curve and a big investment of time to do so, probably a lot more time than it would take you to learn how to do things in FW 6. There’s always a trade-off and that initial ease-of-use comes with a degree of design rigidity unless you already have mad skills in hacking WP templates or are willing to hire a WP dev to do it for you.

Todd

Again, this is from someone who has developed and maintained only the occasional website — all of which were appreciated by my clients and which worked well.

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8

Todd, I really do see your point. In fact, I recently completed a quite excellent lynda.com tutorial on Wordpress. I know that Wordpress would get in the way of design flexibility and that even its most basic sites aren’t as simple as they would appear to be. Truth is, over the last several days I’ve been making myself absolutely crazy trying to decide my best course of action, trying to understand some of the FW Pro 6 changes and more.

What’s probably propelling my angst is partly that the position I held with a nationally award-winning independent skilled nursing facility was eliminated Feb. 22 by a corporation that already owned 14 such facilities and is on an acquisition frenzy. They bought the company on Jan. 1st. I had been doing its website (in Freeway) for 7 years as a contractor prior to coming on board as an employee three years ago, largely to get health benefits. Once an employee, I took them into social media, shot and edited 70 YouTube videos for the company, launched its Facebook and Pinterest pages, etc. In the snap of a finger, my job ended. Now I have no health insurance. No income. And critical decisions to make.

I’m not whining, but I do have to be very careful how I proceed in trying to ramp up my freelance work again, especially now that I’ve added to my skill set.

(Ironically, the site I created for the skilled nursing facility before it was purchased has SO much more than the pathetic, brochure sites the corporate entity has for its other skilled nursing facilities. But all of them will be pulled into a – you guessed it – Wordpress template. The one I built will lose its identity, its personality, and its many pages that brought in business. (This I know from the Google Analytics and Crazy Egg.) That’s corporate thinking, but regrettably, that’s how more and more companies are operating: Going with canned template-driven websites that look pretty but don’t give viewers any real feel whatsoever for the LOCAL company they may or may not do business with. It’s that popular American philosophy of “one size fits all.”

Okay. I guess I am whining. But hopefully you see why I have to make such important choices. For me, how best to move forward with web design services for small- and mid-sized businesses is one of them.

Sorry. More than you want to know. But maybe it’ll help Softpress put into context why the simplicity it touts needs to match the changing reality. I think Softpress should actually get busy and put quite boldly on their site why Freeway is a better choice than Wordpress, because just as corporations are taking over independent companies, Wordpress is taking over the world, or so it would seem . . .

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9

This may be easier said than done, especially given your current situation but it’s something I truly believe is the best long-term solution for anyone who pays the bills as a web designer: invest in yourself. Find the time and take the initiative to educate yourself on how to build inline layouts, whether in FW or not. The way websites are built and the things clients want will only get more complicated and demanding. I appreciate your desire to keep things simple in FW but the design world isn’t waiting for FW to catch-up to ever-changing modern design practices by trying to reduce everything to a point-n-click solution. We adapt or we fall behind the curve. Flexibility is crucial.

I wouldn’t look at it as a WP or FW thing, or even what’s easiest for you. Personally I’ve never found the easy way to be in my best long-term interest. WP is not taking over the world (I know it seems that way), and FW is not necessarily better or worse. They are just tools to support your efforts. The most powerful asset you have is knowledge. If you learn how to build an inline layout that’s something you can carry with you anywhere, regardless of the tool. It gives you power over the tools instead of being dependent on the fickle nature of software to sort it all out. Plus it’s a highly usable and marketable skill, building inline layouts, many would argue an indispensable one.

Put the time in and learn as much as you can. Dissect Ernie’s example and ask questions but don’t look for one tool to be all things to all projects. It doesn’t exist. Learn to use WP if that’s the best tool for the job but don’t stop there. Knowledge and understanding is the great equalizer, the rest is just filler.

Todd

I’m not whining, but I do have to be very careful how I proceed in trying to ramp up my freelance work again, especially now that I’ve added to my skill set.

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10

Good points. I have loads of things beyond websites to do at the moment, but I DO know you, Ernie and Richard are on target. What I probably need to do is actually take a few days off and just do nothing except think. I may be trying to do too much in too short a period of time. Thank you!

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11

I’ve had that problem myself, many times. Sometimes taking a step back to catch your breath and let it all sink ion makes all the difference.

Todd

I may be trying to do too much in too short a period of time.

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12

I’ve done page layouts using both methods. And for some complex tricks, you’d think that a manually constructed inflow layout would be ideal, but in fact, an RPL page let’s you do things you can’t with inflow. To read all the nitty gritty deals of what I mean, read through this entire thread:

http://freewaytalk.net/thread/view/126417

–James Wages

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13

On 6 Mar 2013, 5:26 am, JDW wrote:

… RPL page let’s you do things you can’t with inflow.

… that’s a rumor cause it is in fact the other way round. I followed this thread, rebuilt your page just for fun within 15 minutes using inline-layout without any further issues.

In fact, inline can do much more things than RPL, such as:

  1. Areas that stretch all across the browser (header, footer)

  2. Reacting on growing content during construction!!!

  3. Responsiveness

In fact Inline-constructions will be the key-knowledge for future FW versions and it is close to “hand-crafted” stuff but with the opportunity to have visual control.

The only caveat:

The NEED of using a suitable Image-Editor to prepare stuff as necessary.

I did a complete series of screencasts, starting from “absolute” using the idea of 960gs design, starting slow with first inline-objects, completed this - prepared then the layout to be responsive and finally made it responsive.

These screencasts are paid, but what are 0.79€/for 24h or even 20€/a complete year compared to hours and hours of fiddling with templates and dangerous semi-knowledge?

Curious to hear.

Cheers

Thomas

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14

Pshhht Laura … you’ve got mail :wink:

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15

Soooo… You really rebuilt my page as an inflow just for fun in 15 minutes, then uploaded it to the Atomz server, and then got the page shadow to display in IE7 on windows, eh? If so, please send me your Freeway document because that is the solution I’m looking for. If not, you missed the point of that other thread and completely overlook what I was trying to achieve.

It’s a matter of getting PIE fallback to work on Atomz. And separately from that, the only reason I need an inflow page layout (using RPL or manually) is because the length of the page will shrink or elongate, depending on the number of search results.

—James Wages

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16

no James I haven’t, cause I have too less knowledge about PIE and its purpose (yeahh - I know the IE fallback lower 9).
Honestly, I neither have the time nor the fun to dig in atomz stuff currently.

I only had a look at the shadow issue.

One reason for not rushing into the thread was, that I haven’t had a chance to open your original files, cause my Freeway crashed all the time I tried. The other was, that all experts already been there and they know for sure way more then me small light.

Another significant problem is, that I have no IE lower 9 to test and without any further testings I do not make any kind of statements (such as the shadow filter instead of using .js). And problems with failing .js is not a question of basic framework however built.

But honestly - this all is not part of this thread.

All I said is, that you can do everything in an inline-layout that you can do on every other page-construction method as well (Caveat: lower IE6, inline method won’t work, but I doubt that RPL can do though) - and I hereby double this, it’s just a matter of attitude.

Cheers

Thomas

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17

Thomas, if you have IE 9 or 10, simply press F12 and there will be a section appear at the bottom of your browser window from which you can set a Compatibility Mode. You can simulate IE7 or IE8 very easily this way.

—James Wages

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18

It’s similar, but not the same. I have a many-gigabyte partition for XP/IE8 because I was burned horribly by the “almost” of the simulation.

Walter

On Mar 6, 2013, at 6:27 AM, JDW wrote:

You can simulate IE7 or IE8 very easily this way.

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19

I got it, Richard. (Sent back an email from wordbiz. Hope you received it.) Can’t thank you enough.

On 6 Mar 2013, 8:26 am, Richard van Heukelum wrote:

Pshhht Laura … you’ve got mail :wink:

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20

Whew. I appears I’ve opened quite a debate! It both energizes me and scares me all the more. Yes, Todd, I think I do indeed need a little time to absorb all of this, read the links and files some of you have sent and just see where it all leads me.

The good news? I have some decent video prospects likely to come to fruition fairly soon. Just have to start dabbling with green screen to add to my capabilities.

All of you? You’re the best.

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