I recently have been helping my wife and a fellow artist to start a modern art gallery (www.gallery19essex.com). What to do about a web site? I found a very good web designer who put up a site using Adobe Muse. The idea was that he would design the site and I would be able to maintain it, add images, text, etc. The finished product looks great, but ...
Almost nothing about Adobe Muse works as advertised. First of all, it is proprietary. It will work only with Adobe hosting, not with any standard hosting platform. Secondly, it advertises a Dashboard that will let you edit items from a browser. Guess what? You can’t do any significant editing from the dashboard (not even bolding text).
Once the site was up, I was stuck, unless I wanted to start over again and we didn’t have the money for that. So I had to buy (rent) Adobe Muse. Adobe’s “Creative Cloud” has gone over to all subscription basis, leading some bloggers to refer to Adobe CC as “Captive Consumer.” So I bit the bullet and rented Adobe Muse.
Adobe Muse advertises itself as aimed at “design professionals.” That is, not at people who want simply to be able to maintain a site once it is done. That is accurate. It has a very steep learning curve. Basically a Mac program that has been ported to Windows with indifferent success. From a Windows point of very a large number of functions are totally non-intuitive (why is an “insert” function called “place”?). Editing is extremely klunky and it is extremely easy to mess up the entire site with a few clicks (did that several times). The latest misadventure is that for no apparent reason, HTML codes started showing up in the middle of text. Muse is a new program (only a year or so old) and obviously not mature.
As I said, the end result is great. But if you want to be able to maintain your own web site on a day to day basis instead of paying for every little change and without having to suffer through a steep learning curve, you would do well to stay away from Adobe Muse.
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