No96.com.au is a new website promoting a holiday home on the NSW Central Coast. Designing a low cost website for the client was as much a priority for them as was developing a simple, completely customised site that could be easily maintained.
After investigating various platforms we settled on Adobe Muse to help us create this online presence because it gave us the design flexibility we needed and the low-cost capability that suited our client.
Muse is Adobe’s web-design tool that, according to their website, lets you “create gorgeous HTML5 websites without writing code” and allows you to “stay true to your creative roots and design incredible websites with ease – no need to think like a developer”. Sounds great in theory, but does it deliver and what is it actually like to use?
Firstly, The Plan interface is a great tool to use for plotting out your initial sitemap and considering the user journey. Using the Master Pages panel allows you to wireframe and plan all of the universal elements of the site (i.e. header, navigation, footer). It also enables you to start thinking about how the site will respond dynamically across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.
Once you start designing individual pages you quickly realise how easy it is to place and customise images, graphics and copy. There are also a world of options when it comes to adding site functionality such as how the navigation, menus and states work across the site. Overall, the most useful tool we found was the ability to create a website that responds according to the custom design and freeing us from the restraints of templates.
Once the site is live the client has the ability to easily update site content using an in-browser editing login.
At a time when there is a real gap left between the various “drag and drop” website builder tools currently on the market (Squarespace, Wix, Weebly etc.) that look great on the surface but offer limited opportunity for customisation, and the alternative custom coded or WordPress sites, which require a degree of technical coding knowledge to build and maintain, Muse is a web-designers dream come true!
And most importantly it allows us to create beautiful sites for even better value.
Designing a low cost website is easy with Leading Hand.