Farewell GoLive, we hardly knew ye.
February 8, 2009
It's been several years since GoLiveHeaven was last updated, mostly due to other commitments by its editors and contributors. And now, sadly, GoLive is gone entirely, extinguished from existence in favor of a much-inferior tool, albeit one which managed to have much higher market penetration among developers (vs. designers) and did manage to make significant advances in certain fields where GoLive lacked severely (i.e. Dynamic Content).
So where do users who loved GoLive's ease of use in transforming designs into Web sites turn to now? Well, sadly there is no equivalent solution on the market today (and the nearest one has a Klingon interface). Some applications such as Freeway Pro provide the GUI-enabled ability to design for the Web, but don't offer the same kind of powerful control over the code that GoLive did. Others like Coda give users a wonderful amount of control over their code, but don't provide a graphic user interface for visually laying out a Web design.
As we near the end of the first decade of the century, Web designers are in a position to implement their ideas in a way that was never possible before, throught the use of "Web 2.0" animations and effects. However, in order to do so sucessfully (and in fact in order to do great Web design at all in these times), we have to return to an approach that we were turning away from 10 years ago. We have to get back to the code.
If you've been stuck in GUI-world for the past 10 years, you have to relearn what is still current (it's quite likely you haven't kept up on all the latest X/HTML and CSS standards), figure out how to troubleshoot contemporary Web site code, and learn how to build sites that take advantage of the new paradigms and technologies that are in use today. I know, that sounds like a lot of work, and it is. But it's the only way professional Web design is going to get done until the next great tool comes along to make it acessible to the masses. The bottom line is that, at least for now, Web designers will either have to put up with Klingon GUIs to try to do what they want to do, or start learning code and do things the proper way.
I think the most frustrating thing for the developers of software like GoLive is that the Web is a moving target. What worked this week might be deprecated next week, but might still work for a certain percentage of browsers, but not in others, and then this other solution will work in those, but not in the older ones, and ARGH! In the midst of all that the design tools themselves are coming and going (R.I.P. ImageReady) or changing, so both your starting point and your ending point in the design-to-Web process are in constant flux. And perhaps that's why companies often don't have the stamina to continue in this industry.
But all is not lost. Though there may not be an ideal design-to-Web application out there, there have been some significant application advances in both the design and development fronts, especially for Mac OS X. Applications like Iris and Acorn offer a viable alternative to Web designers who, for any reason (budget constraints or significant GUI issues with other software), want to break away from the monopoly that a certain megacorp has on the market. The aforementioned Coda and other apps like CSSEdit give you unprecedented control over your site's code and, once you become familiar with them and contemporary code conventions, over the way your site looks and feels as well.
Rather than looking at GoLive's death as a setback, I believe we can look at it as an opportunity to grow and improve in ways that would not otherwise have come about, using the tools mentioned above. I look forward to seeing what the community of GoLive designers will come up with in the years to come.
Sincerely,
David Portela
