The Bottom Line
Freeway Pro 5 is a great tool for a small business owner who wants to get a complex site up quickly. It offers a lot of features and tools to make the site interesting. It is especially good at posting graphics and manipulating them so that the site is interesting and fun. Professional Web developers might find it hard to understand at first because the code you're used to seeing is completely hidden.
Pros
- Visual editor makes it easy to build beautiful sites
- Lots of templates can get your site going fast
- Built-in connectivity to Google Adsense, iPhone links, and Blogger
- View site links in a map
- Edit the graphics using lots of built-in filters and presets
Cons
- No way to see the HTML until you've saved and uploaded
- No version control
- No secure FTP
- Can only edit one page at a time with no extended search and replace across the site
- No link checker
Description
- WYSIWYG Web editor for Macintosh
- Standards compliant HTML
- Automatic email address obfuscation
- Edit graphics in the program or switch into your favorite editor
- Table and CSS layout
- Accessibility reporting
- Add visual effects with included Scriptaculous actions
- Map of the links on the site
Guide Review - Freeway 5.4.2 Review
Freeway 5.4.2 is a WYSIWYG editor for Macintosh. At first glance, it appears to be very simple, because it doesn't provide any direct HTML code manipulation, but it offers a lot of features that a professional Web designer might like, including:
- An accessibility reporting tool to check that your pages are accessible
- Importing of PSD files to create a Web page from a Photoshop mockup
- Edit graphics right in the program or use your favorite editor
- View a visual link map of all the links on your site
- Choose how it's saved: HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01, and even XHTML 1.0.
Some of the places where this editor falls down are in the more advanced features. Because it doesn't have any view into the HTML code, it doesn't have things like color coding or HTML validating. You have to rely on the tool to write "more readable" or "more efficient" HTML for you (you can choose from those options). Some other things I'd like to see include:
- Previews for things like wireless devices and other operating systems and browsers
- FTPs or secure FTP
- Search and replace over the whole site
- An external link checker
- Support for unicode and special characters
