Freeway – Quality Web Design For The Rest Of Us

Freeway from Softpress is an application aimed towards people who want to create a website and need something more powerful than the average entry level tools available on the Mac but not as complicated as something like Dreamweaver. With version 4, Freeway moves far beyond it’s humble beginnings by incorporating some extremely useful high end features that allow you to craft some truly beautiful websites, all while getting your hands as dirty as you like. Some of the newest features in this version include:

1. Real CSS Control
2. Standards Compliance (a huge deal)
3. Graphic Box and Text Effects
4. Transparency
5. Unicode Support
6. A New Interface

Purists have always believed that dealing directly with the code is critical to really crafting quality websites but part of that belief often stems from a lack of confidence in the output of many WYSIWYG tools but Freeway is here to challenge that notion. One of the biggest obstacles for a graphical web authoring tool is designing a user interface that makes it easy to get work done while at the same time, masking much of the complexity by giving the user something they intuitively understand and in version 4, Freeway gets closer to achieving that goal.

If you’ve ever used a GUI tool to design a website before, you will feel right at home in Freeway yet if this is your first time using such an application, Freeway goes a long way towards holding your hand while at the same time, it’s not limited in scope or potential. For example, a commonly expected feature is the ability to create nice looking rollover effects without having to actually touch the underlying javascript code and Freeway does this, among many other similar type features in a very first class manner. Not only is it easy on the user, but the underlying code is what you would expect from a first rate web editing tool. A good creative application should feel like a well designed set of artistic tools, comfortable and familiar, even if you’ve never used the application before. As a developer, I can fully appreciate the difficulty of trying to achieve such a noble goal and I believe the folks at Softpress fully understand what it takes to make a quality Macintosh application. Are there rough edges, of course, but even the most mature applications on the platform have their issues but version 4.0 moves the product forward in this particular niche.

Softpress offers a well written CSS Primer which is available for free on their site as well. If you are a newcomer to the world of web development or even a seasoned pro, you have probably heard that we are in the middle of a sea-chage of sorts when it comes to the way that modern websites are built. For far too many years, authors of websites had to contend with a world of intricate hacks in order to get their sites to render properly in multiple browsers by forcing HTML, a markup language, to perform double duty as a layout language. This is nothing new for seasoned web developers but the world as a whole is slowing coming to see the light in designing sites using standards based design and Freeway is a huge help in that respect.

Although CSS has been around for a quiet a while, it was not until we reached the point where the majority of the modern browsers out there and the most popular web design tools adequately supported CSS and allowed designers and developers to more easily achieve the web equivalent of the holy grail in regards to separating content from presentation. Freeway does an admirable job of helping users to bridge that gap by allowing them to create beautiful and elegant websites without having to completely master the intricacies of CSS. Being a huge advocate of designing standards compliant websites for my clients, this feature alone makes Freeway a viable contender for a visual web design tool in my dock.

Freeway comes in both an Express ($99 boxed) and Pro ($279 boxed) versions and they do offer discounts for the downloadable versions as well as educational pricing and competitive upgrades which to me shows that Softpress is in-tune with their market on several different levels. If you are someone who is looking to create a web presence for either yourself, or even a department and you are not yet satisfied with some of the other tools on the market, I highly encourage you to take advantage of the free trial of Freeway. One of the major challenges that I’ve seen when talking about web development tools (like any other kind of software) is that people simply get complacent with the tools that they already have and by getting too comfortable, they tend to shut themselves off from exploring alternatives that might just makes their web developing efforts significantly more productive.

Having said that, as someone who spends a great many hours each day inside of one web development interface or another, I can honestly tell you that this space changes incredibly quickly and the tool vendors like Softpress are rushing to incorporate these new features, standards and development methodologies into their products so that you and I have an easier time creating attractive and functional websites. If you are even the least bit unsatisfied with your current web site building tool, be sure to take a look at Freeway.

I tend to work in extremely diverse environments, one day working in a Dreamweaver / WYSISYG type application and the rest of the time using a pure code environment like BBEdit or TextMate and at the end of the day, it all comes down to finding the right tool for the job. We’re extremely fortunate in the Mac community that we have so many quality options. Half of the web folks in our studio are using Windows (poor souls) and while there is a huge variety of alternatives in that space as well, there is a massive discrepancy when it comes to the quality of applications between the two platforms. I think Freeway is a great example of a fairly complex tool made simple, yet at the same time, retaining a powerful feature set without overwhelming the user. In addition to the Freeway tool itself, Software includes a comprehensive set of tutorial files to help newcomers quickly get up to speed with the product which users of all skill levels will find quite useful. The system requirements for Freeway is Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher and you can find everything you need to know about it on the softpress site here.