Educator's Review: Adobe GoLive 6: Web Power Tool

• By Steve Adler
• 11/01/02

Ramapo College of New Jersey participates in a federal grant— PT3, Teaching Teachers to Teach with Technology—under which the faculty is learning to create their own Web sites. As a result, they needed a Web-design package that would allow them to integrate all types of Web sites built and designed in every way imaginable. The school also wanted to integrate the latest technologies into these projects using cross-media workflows and to be able to teach essential skills in one uniform environment to empower the rapidly growing community of Web authors.

The staff and students feel comfortable with the GoLive program from Adobe because it allows the visual design and page layout techniques used in other programs to be easily transferred to the users' Web projects. Entire sites can be conceptualized and diagrammed visually. These diagrams are then made live as part of the Web-site design.

Pages made up of templates and components—objects composed of HTML snippets—make revision and site-wide changes simple. If a change is made in a component, all the pages containing it are immediately updated. GoLive ships with a set of complete site templates, which is great for allowing users to explore page mechanics as they build their own projects.

To help build enhanced Web pages containing floating boxes and Dynamic HTML, GoLive uses a timeline editor which is similar to that found in other Adobe applications. In addition, a full QuickTime interactive authoring environment is included.

For incorporating JavaScript, GoLive ships with over 75 different JavaScript "Actions" that are built right into the interface. Assigning and configuring these is done through GoLive's site inspector, the heart of the application. For purists who like to hand-code their JavaScript, GoLive allows its Actions code to be stripped clean of proprietary tags so that custom code can be edited efficiently through the built-in JavaScript editor.

New in GoLive 6 is the addition of variable support to Smart Objects, Adobe's technology for allowing native graphics files to be re-sampled and adjusted to fit the Web designer's needs. With variable support, the author can open an Adobe graphics image in GoLive, access the text layer as a variable, and generate a new graphic containing the modified text. For those needing quick text banners layered into SWF files, these variables can be controlled through Adobe's LiveMotion 2.

Version 6 now includes greater built-in support for workgroups and ships with a new Web Workgroup Server CD. If you combine GoLive's features with its tight integration and open support for industry-standard technologies, availability for both Mac and Window's newest operating systems, and generous CD resources, you have the basis for a Web curriculum that not only helps to teach effective Web design but also provides the latest tools for teaching Web development in a variety of environments.

Steve Adler works with Ramapo College of New Jersey Consortium for Improving Teacher Training in Technology. He also teaches Web design with Adobe GoLive at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and is Web coordinator and Staff Developer for the Northern Valley Regional High School district in Bergen County, N.J.