What tools have been used to create web pages for Enterprise users?
I have tremendous aversion to hand coding web pages to use for Panorama forms and such. What GUI tools are others using that might allow the incorporation of Panorama web page elements without a tremendous amount of work?
And if others are truly slogging through the hand coding of web pages, I’d like to hear that too.
I use Dreamweaver to get a page the way I want it, then copy the HTML to a procedure and edit. DW has a fair amount of non coding tools.
I’ve used Dreamweaver to create HTML pages as well as doing a lot of hand coding. I have a great aversion to Adobe’s licensing model so am looking for a new WSYWIG editor.
For the most part, I save the HTML pages as templates to be used in Enterprise with WebForm Merge and WebMerge. Works great.
I’ve tried a number of things and settled happily on RapidWeaver.
Furthering the original question…
My destination will be iPads and iPhones most always, with little to no computer browser viewing these forms.
Any suggestions or ideas for those that have dealt with these potentially unique layout/font/confined pages? My end result will be NO scrolling pages with design for the least common denominator phone screen size. Essentially mimicking an iPhone/iPad application.
Suggested page sizes? Font sizes? Minimum font size? Fonts for clarity?
I think that most modern WYSIWYG web editors have built in facilities for making pages that play well on iOS devices; I know RapidWeaver is very good at that.
Interesting that RapidWeaver was brought up here. I used RapidWeaver for a decade, but I’ve now decided to switch to hand coding. As web technology has gotten more complex, I find that using a WYSIWIG tool gets in my way and I think makes things more difficult, rather than less. I felt like I was constantly fighting the tools and that it was really hard to keep track of what was actually going on.
The new ProVUE.com web site was hand coded using Bootstrap. I won’t claim that made it simple or super easy, but I do feel the process was more transparent. And it made it a lot easier to make a web site that was responsive, i.e. works well on mobile devices as well as desktop browsers. If you haven’t looked at provue.com on your phone, it looks pretty good.
If you do use RapidWeaver, I highly recommend Stacks by YourHead software.
There are a lot of great plug-ins available for Stacks, though that also was becoming a problem, as it seemed I would constantly need another $10 or $20 plug-in, and then keep track of them was a pain. And documentation was often a problem, especially as multiple vendors were involved. In fact my frustrating experience in this area was part of the inspiration for trying to make the Panorama X documentation as complete as possible.
By determining the viewport your CSS can set up the pages to match the device’s viewing area. You can have a different stylesheet load, based on the device, which can determine the scale of graphics, or even turn some off. You can define the HTML tags to fit too with h1 at, say 1 em on an iPad and .9 em on an iPhone.
Regarding RapidWeaver…it’s popular, but it’s code is robotic overkill. If you don’t need to hand edit that’s not such a big deal. If you do need to edit, good luck in figuring it out. If you want to embed Panorama fields and variables in the pages it won’t always be easy.
Hi RAmeeti,
The hand-coded ProVUE website is beautiful and useful, as mentioned in this thread.
If you are looking for a WISYWIG tool, then look at Webflow. I have not tried it yet, but it looks very powerful and easy to use, to me.