*** PLEASE NOTE THAT ADOBE MUSE HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED. AS FROM MARCH 26,2018***
I have always been a big fan of Adobe Products, especially Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks and Illustrator. I pretty use all of those programs everyday. I am a monthly subscriber to the Adobe Creative Cloud, so we get a lot more programs that we did before and the updates are really nice as well. So a couple of months ago, I was going through the list of programs and saw Adobe Muse and downloaded it and gave it a try, so this my personal review of what I thought of product and where i see it placed in my own business.
So as mentioned before I download Adobe Muse CC and installed it on to my computer. The download was pretty quick off Creative Cloud and simple to install. Once I entered my Adobe ID and password I was in the program.
I found the program quite resource hungry a lot like Photoshop when you have a lot of large photos open. I would advise anyone to have a look at some video tutorials on Youtube and Lynda.com before they start using Adobe Muse as there is a bit of a learning curve. Not difficult, but good to know the trips and tricks before hand.
PROS
- Simple and easy to build webpages and Quick
- Build responsive websites – Options to Build Tablet and Mobile version of the site
- Widgets such as Google Maps, Forms, Slideshow, Panels, Social etc.
- Easy to create Parallax Scrolling websites with easy scrolling widgets
- Using Master templates allows you to create new pages easily and keep the design
- Using the Web Fonts Collection Typekit is integrated quite nicely
- Easy to Upload with FTP built in
- Easy to do roll over effects
Cons
- Not easy to make changes to Code on the fly without using the Software
- Quite Heavy on Computer Resources
- Some of the websites built in Muse are a little bit slower than websites built in Dreamweaver
- Form doesn’t work when you have a different email address than your domain ie. a gmail email account
- Code output isn’t always W3C compatible
Conclusion
I think Adobe Muse is in its infancy. I think it will improve and provide a lot more features later on. As a web designer and developer I would only use this to do mockups or maybe a parallax scrolling website. Other than that I would prefer to code my websites. This would be ideal for an entry level web designer or someone wanting to build a website for the first time, who doesn’t know how to code yet.
For me I will stick to Dreamweaver and Content Management Websites. I think it has a place in the industry, just not for me.
Here are a couple of screenshots of Adobe Muse in action.