Freeway 5 Pro

I found Freeway Pro 5.5 very good . I'm very happy with the product and the people at Freeway for their support.

The ideal app for the beginner, with a ton of power and features for professionals. I've been using this for creating serious corporate sites for years. I made my trek from PageMill to GoLive to Dreamweaver, and finally switched to Freeway at version 3 because I was tired of the klunky nature of DW and am now using version 7. It is a great WYSISYG app and it supports custom tags and code, plus it is way easier. For example, the CSS interface doesn't feature a massive pile of choices all at once. You simply choose attributed from pop-up lists and set them as you wish, plus you can extend they with tags, Google analytics code, GoogleFonts, etc. It also comes with a lot of Actions (plug-ins) for everything from targets, rollovers and favicons to PayPal and more. There are also quite a few third party actions available. Also, there is a very active user community and if you have a question, you can get an answer from the forum usually within an hour (and sometimes immediately). You can also email tech support (based in the UK, by the way) and get solid support from them. They have also been known to have users send them their site document for hands-on assistance with an issue (let's see Adobe match that).Among other things, the current version - Freeway 7 Pro - lets you create tabs for custom page widths to correspond to various devices. Switch tabs, alter the layout and that's it. It will detect the device and switch layouts (such as iPad landscape and portrait) on the fly. It also supports shared authoring, which can be very useful.Again, Freeway 5 Pro is a bit dated. Go for 7 pro. (By the way the somewhat crippled "non-pro" version is free. Check out the freebie, then buy the pro version.Note: This app generates clean HTML (choice of verbose and efficient) during the build phase. It is not ideally suited for importing existing sites.Using the combination of Freeway, Tumult Hype (for HTML5 animations), Photoshop and an online video streaming service, this makes for a very powerful professional website design solution.

Not for beginners, as advertised. Even the smallest task such as adding an image to your page requires literally hours of reading through a 300+ page manual.Softpress offers a message board for support topics but many of the issues go unresolved. There are a number of bugs in the program too, that require you to quit and restart.You'll need a PC (Windows) machine to check your work and make sure your site displays properly. If you don't have a Windows PC, then you'll need to find a friend who does (this is actually stated in the manual).Overall, it has a lot of potential, but it is not at all intuitive or user friendly. Be prepared to spend hours of reading up on how to complete simple tasks.

I have been using Freeway since virtually it's inception. I have in the past and still use a whole raft of other applications like, Dreamweaver, Text-mate, Expresso, Coda.... and along the way I have tried a massive amount of other programs which I cant even remember any more, and comparing Freeway with virtually any other peace of software like Dreamweaver or Coda is actually a bit pointless.The realities are, is that Freeway is a compiler (creates and recreates the HTML pages constantly depending on the design and if that page changes then so does the construction) and most if not all the other major applications are editors (you edit and build as you go along).The difference between these two methodologies is the core to Freeway strength and in some peoples eyes it's complete weakness.The realities are in most of my projects I don't actually know what the absolute best and optimum method will be to constructing a website, and the reason for this is clients. All my work is based on client briefs and these briefs are never EVER set in stone. So there are always tweaks and it is here that freeway wins absolutely hands down. If the client asks me make amendments then I don't have to worry about the impact of what that amendment may make. If they suddenly feel they want a page to become an email page then that's fine... its just a matter duplicating a page and apply an freeway action which makes freeway publish that page in a completely different built email ready format. Basically there is no unpicking what I may have taken hours of careful construction to make amendments that have major impact on the best and optimum construction.As far as "is it easy to use" then I am obviously gong to say absolutely yes it is. Again one of the reviews has mentioned that it takes absolutely hours of reading a 300 page manual to import an image... Then all I can say is I am not sure what software they were looking at. You can import an image in less than few seconds (just import an image like any other bit of software - cmd E) as far as the message board issues not being resolved, then again this person must have had a terrible experience. I know that this community is one of the most successful and above all helpful and polite communities around, regardless whether you are new or an experienced user. As far as needing a windows machine to check your html then that's not actually true. You actually need to check your page in internet explorer which isn't made for the mac operating system. So either you can use one of the pc emulators, an online service, a pc or even something like crossover to check how that particular browser has rendered your webpage. The same would be true if you were building on a pc.... you will still need to see how it looks on a mac based browsers like in Chrome, Safari, Firefox , Opera.Freeway comes in two forms Express and Pro. Express is a very good program which is better than most of its competition but Freeway Pro is a proper professional application which what I use. I still use Dreamweaver, Coda Textmate ect but if I need to choose one then there's no contest..... Freeway Pro every time.

If you've got a bit of design experience and don't want a template style website this software gives you loads of flexibility.