Using Adobe GoLive CS, Part 1
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Although Dreamweaver is the tool of choice for many Web designers, Adobe's GoLive also offers a professional quality Web authoring tool that integrates natively with numerous other industry leading products, such as photoshop. Today, learn how to get started, and start on your way to using Adobe's Creative Suite like a pro. (This chapter comes from
Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite, by Mordy Golding, Sams, 2004, ISBN: 067232752X.)
Adobe InDesign CS and Adobe GoLive CS are kindred spirits. Both of these applications are what I call "aggregators," meaning you use them to bring together text, images, and multimedia elements created elsewhere. Yes, you can do some drawing in InDesign, and yes, you can do image compression, cropping, and animation in GoLive; but the heavy lifting in terms of creating image assets is done in Adobe Photoshop, ImageReady, and Illustrator.
None of the graphics tools in the Creative Suite, however, have anything remotely like GoLive's incredibly powerful site management capabilities for links. Web sites can have dozens, hundreds, even thousands of pages, each including multiple links to additional pages, images, and more. Long, long ago (like 1992), most people kept track of URLs by keeping copious notes and by testing, testing, testing. These days, though, you leave that stupefying job to GoLive.
What's New in GoLive CS? - New features in GoLive CS are support for CSS Level 2, Syntax hinting, and code- completion. Package for GoLive is an innovative new way of reusing print assets on the Web. Queries for finding site elements and Collections for grouping pages together are two more unique GoLive CS tools. We'll cover these new features as well as the basics of Web site creation as we continue through this chapter.
Introduction to GoLive CS
Like the other applications in the Creative Suite, GoLive helps you out when you first open the application by greeting you with a few basic choices in the Welcome dialog box: New Page, New Site, and Open. If you prefer not to have this dialog salute you every time you open the application, you can disable it by unchecking Show This Dialog at Startup in the lower-left corner (see Figure 9.1). No worries; if you change your mind, you can turn it back on again in the GoLive preferences. Our suggestion? Turn it off. Anything you can do there you can also do after the application has launched, thank you very much.
Figure 9.1 GoLive CS's Welcome screen offers the choice of creating a new page, creating a new site, or opening an existing page or site. Hold down on the Open button for a moment to access a list of recently used files.
What do the choices in the Welcome screen do? If you choose New Page, you'll get a new blank generic HTML page, called untitled.html. If you choose New Site, you'll invoke the GoLive Site Wizard, which steps you through the creation of a site. We'll go over the steps in the wizard shortly, but for now you need to know only this: To take advantage of GoLive's incredibly powerful site management and link tracking tools, you always need to work from within a site window, and that is exactly what the Site Wizard creates. So forego the single new page in favor of a new site and you'll be on the right track. You will, of course, be able to create new pages from within your site.
Let's define "site" at this point. A site, in GoLive-speak, consists of the following things: a site file, a web-content folder, a web-data folder, and a web-settings folder. These four items are automatically created on your hard drive whenever you create a new GoLive site or import an existing site into GoLive, and they are neatly tucked into an umbrella folder that keeps them all together. Double- clicking on a site file opens it up in a site window. The site file is the shepherd that keeps track of the sheep, the sheep being the other three folders and any items included in them.
Note - Using GoLive, you can create as many sites as you want. You can have more than one site window at a time, and you can even drag and drop from one to another. Use caution when working with more than one site window at a time, though. It's very easy to inadvertently save work into the wrong one, and it can be a real pain to put things right again. If you are a novice at GoLive, you are better off opening only one site file at a time.
 This chapter is from Teach Yourself Adobe Creative Suite, by Mordy Golding (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 067232752X). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today.
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