I have been having a look around the Freeway gallery on the Softpress site. A lot of these web sites are old and are looking less than slick compared with today’s web 2 offerings.
Is it possible to produce a slick looking site with Freeway? I am asking this in all seriousness. Are the better designers amongst the crowd in FreewayTalk using other software to polish off their sites?
Can anyone proffer a link to a really slick commercial site deigned and made predominantly in Freeway? - apart from the Softpress site of course! duh!
They’re not especially slick, but the clients love 'em.
=o)
Heather
*Which doesn’t mean I am not intrigued by the Scriptaculous effects,
or the CSS menus, or the rounded HTML boxes and effects. It’s just
there’s a time and a place.
Well nice clean and efficient for sure … but not very inspiring. Is that pic of the two vans (C&H) resized in Freeway by you Heather? Needs a touch up …
Sometime around 30/3/08 (at 13:51 -0400) John-Paul Kernot said:
I have been having a look around the Freeway gallery on the
Softpress site. A lot of these web sites are old and are looking
less than slick compared with today’s web 2 offerings.
I’m going to leave responding to this to others, apart from just a
couple of things. One is a URL: http://www.walterdavisstudio.com/,
and the other is just an observation that the Softpress gallery is,
of course, open to anyone who uses Freeway and wants to submit
their site. There may be a small amount of editorial decision making,
I don’t know. But it is a gallery of user sites, not explicitly a
gallery of the best that can be done with the software.
When I was first exploring Freeway, I didn’t know a good web design software program from a bad web design software program. That said, I did have an eye for good, well-designed websites, which is different.
During my review of web design software programs, I felt as though Freeway was doing itself a disservice by putting up a gallery of poorly-designed sites because it leads the novice (which I was at the time) to believe that the bad design was as a result of the software, not the designer.
So, I’d recommend to the good people at Softpress (all of whom I’m a big fan of) to be more selective about which designs they feature. We might be losing some sales to people who think that Freeway, being less expensive, doesn’t have the design capabilities that Dreamweaver does, and that’s basically not true.
Is it possible to produce a slick looking site with Freeway? I am
asking this in all seriousness. Are the better designers amongst
the crowd in FreewayTalk using other software to polish off their
sites?
What are these softwares that ‘polish’? You seem to be under the
impression that the software you use to design websites is
responsible for the look and feel of them. It isn’t so. If you have
the ability to design a great site, it doesn’t matter much what you
use to do it with.
I get really sick of people writing to me about my site and saying
‘wow, great shots, what sort of camera do you use?’. Like it matters.
How many of the sites that are in the Freeway gallery still up and running. I know of at least one site that is in the gallery but has been removed from the internet.
Sometime around 30/3/08 (at 14:21 -0400) Jamie Turner said:
During my review of web design software programs, I felt as though
Freeway was doing itself a disservice by putting up a gallery of
poorly-designed sites because it leads the novice (which I was at
the time) to believe that the bad design was as a result of the
software, not the designer.
A very good point. My thanks to John-Paul for raising this and to you
for making it clear enough to get through my sleep-deprived skull.
Perhaps what would be better is a ‘Community Gallery’ that people
submit to as they do now, and a ‘Showcase Gallery’ that is selected
from the best of those and anywhere else. Promote the Showcase
gallery more on the site, with the Community gallery being there as
well but not as the first thing a first-time visitor would reach for.
I think there’s value in how the gallery is right now, but I have to
agree that it isn’t great for people wondering how good their Freeway
sites could be.
I started a site called FreewayUsers a very long time ago, that due to the non-dynamic nature of the site - required me to constantly be adding to it… I would be willing to work with anyone(s) willing to help make the site more dynamic for creating a site that could be sites designed by anyone and thereby allowing SP to be more of a showcase chosen by and maintained by them…
Right on Paul. I knit sweaters, well designer knits, I use a couple
of old, not very fancy knitting machines and my head and my hands but
I’ve been selling them for good $$$ for years to clients who come
back for more.
Colleague artisans use old equipment, stuff they may have got at the
Dollar Store. Artists use pencil and paper, sculptors use lumps of
clay and rock…
So, it’s not the tools it’s the craftsperson behind the tools. Moving
to a more expensive, different software isn’t going to make anyone a
‘slick’ designer if they aren’t already.
Cheers, Carolyn
On Mar 30, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Paul Bradforth wrote:
On 30 Mar 2008, at 18:51, John-Paul Kernot wrote:
Is it possible to produce a slick looking site with Freeway? I am
asking this in all seriousness. Are the better designers amongst
the crowd in FreewayTalk using other software to polish off their
sites?
What are these softwares that ‘polish’? You seem to be under the
impression that the software you use to design websites is
responsible for the look and feel of them. It isn’t so. If you have
the ability to design a great site, it doesn’t matter much what you
use to do it with.
I get really sick of people writing to me about my site and saying
‘wow, great shots, what sort of camera do you use?’. Like it matters.
