PRODUCT REVIEW
Freeway Pro 5.2: Slick Site Designs Without Hand-Coding

Freeway Pro 5.2 helps overcome that problem by giving designers the tools they need to build great sites without requiring them to develop strong coding skills -- and it does it all without compromising on visual and behind-the-scenes code quality.

Freeway Pro will likely feel more comfortable in the hands of InDesign and QuarkXPress users than any other Web-design application, thanks to its page layout application-like interface.

Along with its familiar interface elements, it also supports drag-and-drop to add new items to a layout along with placing items in containers, both of which are day in and day out activities for page layout pros.

Items in a layout can be manipulated and moved, and text can be converted to a graphic when you need to create special text effects -- or when relying on the site viewer's built-in fonts could ruin the overall design.

Basic image-editing is supported in Freeway Pro, which means that if you need to resize, rotate, crop and flip graphics, you make your changes without modifying the original file in Photoshop or some other image-editing application.

Figuring Out Features

Site designers who aren't sure exactly where to start can take advantage of the built-in templates, all of which are fully editable. For designers who want to build from scratch, a blank template is included.

While I found Freeway Pro's image-editing tools easy to use, I was initially unsure of where to find the features. I assumed they would be under the Edit menu, but instead they were hiding under the Item menu. They were also available by Control-clicking object containers, which is actually a much more efficient way to access the image-manipulation tools.

Figuring out how to use features that I wasn't familiar with went smoothly. Softpress did a great job of documenting Freeway Pro's features in the application's PDF manual -- which is a big plus, because first-time users might feel a little intimidated by the scope of features packed into the application.

The in-application help, however, felt a little thin. Searching the Help system for information on resizing images, for example, did not return any results.

For users who aren't sure how certain features work, or for users looking for new ways to take advantage of what's hiding under Freeway's hood, Softpress has a nice set of online video tutorials.

Getting More Technical

Freeway Pro also handles the more technical aspects of Web-site design, like working with CSS and XHTML, without overloading your brain. Its interface handles the dirty work, while you focus on making the elements look the way you want.

It includes a long list of built-in actions that handle things like button rollovers, blogging interface elements, site navigation, embedding Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Maps and AdSense information, and more.

Site designers looking to cater to the iPhone and iPod touch crowd are in luck, too. Freeway Pro 5.2 added the ability to create iPhone-specific Web sites, and can build iPhone application links for e-mail, phone dialing, YouTube and Google Maps. It can also build different versions of movie files optimized for EDGE connections, WiFi and 3G connections, and regular desktop or laptop computers.

The eye candy that Web design apps create only goes so far. Eventually, the code that it builds to make your Web sites look right will get put to the test, and Freeway Pro holds up there, too. It supports HTML and XHTML Web Consortium standards, and builds your site code on export instead of on the fly, like other Web design apps do.

Building site code on export means that Freeway Pro has a better chance of creating optimized code, since the app can look at your site as a whole when it generates the code. The downside is that users who are more comfortable hand-tweaking their code won't be able to.

Despite the lack of access to a site's raw code, however, I didn't find Freeway Pro to feel limited. Instead, I felt like I was able to focus more on site design and layout, because I wasn't going to have to jump over to a code view and manually adjust my HTML or CSS.

The Bottom Line

The Web design world is filled with applications that help you build sites, but Freeway Pro 5.2 takes a slightly different approach than many other titles by focusing on the design part of a Web site instead of the coding part.

While that might seem like a good recipe for a hobbled application that shines at making eye candy but fails at building code, that's not the case with Freeway Pro -- it handles the heavy under-the-hood lifting, leaving you free to build professional and versatile sites without having to worry about hand- coding.