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 UNTIL RECENTLY, putting a Web page together
chiefly involved my use of Notepad and inserting HTML codes that
I picked up from Laura Lemay's great book Teach Yourself Web
Publishing with HTML 3.0. But now that I have Adobe's Page Mill 3.0, the task has become
much easier. Inserting images, animated GIFs, Shockwave, sounds
and movie clips is as simple as dragging items into Page Mill's
pasteboard and placing them on the page.
A recent challenge was to create
a Web page for an after-school dancing program at the Newtown
Middle School. Reviews of Page Mill that I came across in different
publications showed me that designers were able to create a whole
Web site in a couple of hours. I admit it took me longer than
that to create a decent site, since I first had to learn to navigate
the program (Page Mill is not entirely intuitive, in my opinion).
Features
Page Mill 3.0 comes on a CD that
includes a choice of buttons, backgrounds, movie clips, images,
and sound. In addition, you can download more animation from
Xoom Web site, but each time I tried to access it, the site is
busy. Page Mill 3.0 also has a spell-checker, which I find a
bit awkward since it never tells you when it's finished checking
a story (MS Word at least says "Spell Check complete")
and would probably go on checking forever if you didn't stop
it.
Help
To get acquainted with Page Mill
3.0, I first spent some time taking the tour. Soon I was ready
to move from the tutorial and start creating a page. Once upon
a time software came with big thick manuals. But now Help files
are more prevalent, and Page Mill is no different. The manual
covers the tutorial material and includes the basics. Pressing
F1 from within the program brings up the Help file.
 Easy to use
With Page Mill it is a snap to add
backgrounds and insert tables, e-mail addresses, and links within
and outside the site. It is also easy to create a form, inserting
checkboxes, radio and pop-up buttons, and password fields.
Useful tools
The program offers several organizational
tools to help you manage your site. Page Mill 3.0 recommends
doing site upkeep from within the program not from another program,
though this is possible. The site overview and list view are
both convenient tools for keeping the site organized and show
a graphical view of file locations. You can also use the organizational
tools to check for broken links.
Edit, click, preview
It takes a click of the mouse to
move from Edit mode, in which you create your site, to Preview
mode, where you can see how your page will really look on the
page. You can also preview your page easily through Internet
Explorer, which is tightly integrated with Page Mill, or less
easily with Netscape.
Uploading
Uploading from within Page Mill
is very convenient. After checking your site by using one of
the three convenient organizational tools, you can easily uploaded
it. I simply added information about my ISP and the site was
up. Subsequently, when pages are modified or added, those specific
pages can be uploaded to the rest of the site. A log file listing
the uploaded files and the status of the upload can be viewed
and printed.
System Requirements
Page Mill 3.0's minimum recommendations
call for a 486 processor using Windows 95 with 16MB of RAM. I
use the program on a Pentium II and found it stable: It never
crashed my machine and didn't give me any error messages.
* * *
Within a couple of days I managed
to accumulate enough basic knowledge to create a rudimentary
site. In the fall, when the school staff is back, the site I
created will be moved to the school page. In the meantime, I
put it on my space at http://w3.nai.net/~mgaberel. Page Mill 3.0
has lots of potential and I am looking forward to using it more
to take advantage of all its tools. Visit the Page Mill page
on Adobe's site at http://www.adobe.com. |
