With advanced packages such as the latest Photoshop (to be reviewed next month) Adobe is the leading software developer when it comes to traditional graphic design, but it was caught napping by the advent of the Internet. For a long time the companys only Web offering was the underpowered PageMill which allowed Macromedia to fill the gap with its Dreamweaver package. Adobe saw the light just in time and bought up the well-regarded GoLive CyberStudio. Last years launch of the renamed GoLive 4 was little more than a PC update of the existing Mac-only version, but the major changes in this latest release show just how determined Adobe is to put right its mistake and to seize the high ground in Web design.

This is immediately apparent in GoLives revamped interface thats been given an Adobe-style makeover. Many of these changes are welcome, such as the more consistent menus, customisable keyboard shortcuts and comprehensive context menus, but other improvements are more debatable. In particular, where version 4 made do with just six floating palettes, there are now 17. The power made available is impressive, but so is the potential for confusion especially as some palettes, such as the Objects and Colour palettes, offer up to nine tabs while the Site window now offers ten. At least palettes can now be grouped together and docked to each other, but even so, your working environment can soon become unworkable. Adobes bizarre solution to this is the Reset Palettes command which deliberately piles all palettes on top of each other in the middle of the screen. The sooner the GoLive interface is given a Photoshop 6-style rationalisation the better.

Power to the people

In terms of power, GoLive 5 adds new functionality from initial setup through to final posting. In the past, site planning was largely left to pen and paper but now GoLive offers serious site building and storyboard tools. Using the new Design window and menu with the context-sensitive toolbar, you can quickly build up the organisation of sections of your site by adding new child, parent and sibling links to any given anchor page. You can then reposition pages to make the hierarchy clearer, or physically rearrange the pages by dragging and dropping. You can also open multiple panes to see a panorama view of the entire site or a spotlight view of the links to a given page.

Storyboarding in this way is an excellent method of conceptualising your design, and as the pages arent live, but rather stored in a separate designs folder, you can experiment with multiple layouts. You can even annotate your layouts as part of an overall submission and approval process. Best of all, when youve settled on a design you can simply submit it for staging which instantly adds all pages to the main site. If you regret the decision you can even automatically recall submitted pages.

The power is undoubtedly impressive, right down to the ability to control the bend of connector lines. On the other hand, the more advanced features, such as the use of named groups and collections of pages, can be confusing. More disappointing is the fact that GoLive doesnt let you use the site design to create automatic navigation links and rollovers in the way NetObjects Fusion does. Initially this looks possible with the New Pages command that lets you specify automatic links to parent, child or sibling pages. Unfortunately, these links arent actual but rather pending - in other words youll be reminded to add them but youll still have to do this manually.

After site planning, the next Web-authoring stage is page design. GoLive has recognised the common practice of using bitmap editors, such as Photoshop, to create layout blueprints on which the HTML page is built. Using the new Tracing Image palette you can import images in a wide range of bitmap formats and set a desired level of opacity. A nice refinement in the GoLive implementation is the palettes Crop tool. Using this you can mark off areas of the tracing image and promote them to become a part of the overall page design as Floating Boxes. In the process of saving each image area, GoLive opens its own version of Photoshops excellent Save for Web dialog, to allow you to preview and set optimisation settings.

This is only the beginning of GoLives new image handling. A new tab on the Objects Palette lets you choose from a range of SmartObjects. Using the main Photoshop and Illustrator SmartObjects you can create a link to images in each of these applications native PSD and AI file formats, and GoLive will again open the Save for Web dialog so you can choose an optimised JPEG or GIF version for inclusion in the posted page. The beauty is that this link is kept live so that if you resize an image on your page, GoLive will automatically open the original and recalculate the new optimised version with no intervention from you. Even better, by double-clicking, you can open the image back into its original application for re-editing. To quickly change the text on a rollover button, for example, this is very useful.

Auto-optimisation and late-stage editing are huge improvements on trying to simultaneously manage native and Web versions of your images, but theres one huge drawback - each SmartObject must be linked to a separate image which is hardly practical when you want to change the look of all your navigation buttons. Initially, it looks like GoLive offers the solution to this with its Import Photoshop as HTML command. This works by importing each layer in a PSD to its own floating HTML box, which is great for setting up DHTML animations. The links arent live, however, so you cant easily update the Layers as you can with SmartObjects.

In any case, support for Photoshop is welcome but, without features such as rollovers, it still lags some way behind Adobes dedicated Web applications, LiveMotion and ImageReady. Whats really needed is for GoLive to offer SmartObjects for LiveMotion and ImageReady which would let you update either the current SVG- or GIF-based button or rollover, or every example across the entire page. The advantages of such seamless interworking would be huge but for the moment the LiveMotion SmartObject only lets you edit single standalone SWF files and, bizarrely, there isnt a SmartObject for ImageReady at all.

When it comes to designing individual pages, GoLive still primarily bases its layout control on its use of text box and image placeholders that you drag onto a Layout Grid. The big advantage that this offers is completely freeform layout for designers that GoLive converts into pixel-precise HTML tables behind the scenes. Alternatively, these days you can use CSS-based Floating Boxes, but until browser support is universal this probably isnt advisable and, accordingly, GoLive now lets you convert Floating Box designs to Layout Grid equivalents.

An historical feature

The main drawback to GoLives conversion of Layout Grids to tables is that its easy for the code involved to bloat, especially as avoiding a bug in Netscape involves heavy use of the >SPACER< tag. One way to cut down on code is to ensure that text boxes and images are aligned which you can now do with the new Align palette. You can also use the new Transform palette to precisely control an objects size and position. In fact, most of this power was already available via GoLives context-sensitive toolbar, but the History palette, at least, is entirely new and finally provides GoLive with multiple levels of undo.
GoLives use of the Layout Grid is great for non-coders and those for whom the visual impact of the page is more crucial than its download time, but theres no reason why it shouldnt offer good direct table handling too. The power on offer here has been improved with a new Table palette offering two new tabs. The first of these lets you select rows, columns and cells on a proxy version of the cur