Adobe has unveiled its new web design programme.

Muse allows graphic designers to create and publish websites without having to write code or work within restrictive templates.

The programme uses web standards including HTML 5, CSS3 and JavaScript. Its beta version is currently available as a free preview from the Adobe website and then a full version will go on sale in early 2012.

It is targeted primarily at designers and artists who are used to working with print, enabling them to work online without having to learn code. As such, Muse is built on a process that is very similar to InDesign, one of the most popular graphic design programmes on the market.

The programme provides a full set of pre-coded widgets for creating interactive site elements, allowing designers to create effects such as lightboxes and navigation menus. It automatically generates all HTML, CSS and scripting for the design and allows users to publish from within the programme.

In a further bid to make the programme as easy to use as possible, Muse also offers sitemaps, master pages and flexible tools. It also allows users to embed code from sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Google Maps: “Muse was built with the print designer in mind. It allows designers who are not coders to create unique, professional websites as easily as producing a layout in InDesign.

“This is an end-to-end solution with interactive elements like slideshows, tool tips, remote rollovers and lightboxes. It allows the designer to do things that only a hand-coder could do.”

One of the important concerns to web designers is striking a balance between the creative aspect of a website in terms of style and media and being able to implement the design into an accessible and standards compliant site which can be read by search engines. Web technologies have come a long way in a short time in helping to achieve this with xhtml, css and javascript providing a more flexible way of realising ideas while maintaining clean, structured code and accessibility standards. More recently newer developments are becoming available which are pushing the possibilities of the web and raising the bar in the flexibility designers and developers have. As long as the ideas keep flowing on what we would like to achieve on the web, the technology will continue to advance inorder to match this.

CSS3

Css3 has been in development for a few years but is now beginning have some of its features supported better. There a number of interesting features which have been developed to meet design trends, so as to make the implementation of these stylings easier, though many of them are still currently unsupported by browsers, especially Internet Explorer. Some of the features include:

- Multi column allows the developer to position blocks of text in several columns similar to print.

- Rounded corners can be achieved on elements by setting a radius on the corner.

- Border images allow the developer to create custom shaped elements by setting graphics for each corner and sides of an element.These 3 features are only currently supported in Firefox and Safari 3.

- Border color allows gradient borders to be used though are currently only supported by Firefox.

- HSL colors have been introduced, which aswell as setting the colour also allows you to set the hue, saturation and lightness of colours, providing a lot more flexibility in colour schemes. So far this is supported by Opera 9.5, Safari 3, Konqueror and Mozilla.

- One of the most popular features of css3 is opacity. This can be set on different elements allowing a gradient effect to be achieved. This is supported by most browsers except Internet Explorer.

- Box sizing is an interesting one as previously padding and borders were always added to the width of an element but now can be added inside a div. Firefox and Safari support this with the prefix -moz- and -webkit- respectively though Opera simply works with box-sizing.

- Font-face was included in css2 but was only supported by Internet Explorer if an .eot font format was used but Safari 3.1 now allows Truetype or Opentype font to be implemented in designs.

Flash accessibility.

Flash has always been a blessing and curse to both developers and users. It can achieve unique interactive experiences for users and bring a site to life but with search engines unable to extract text or links from the file, it has made flash sites often inaccessible and difficult to index. In the last 6 months it was announced by Google and Adobe that the algorithm Google uses is dramatically changing which will allow text and links from flash files to be read and allow sites to be indexed better in search results. Adobe is developing a flash reader for search engines which will allows the files to be read. Another technology which employs Flash and provides developers with more flexibility in terms of typefaces on the web in Sifr. This is a type replacement technology which allows any typeface to be employed in a website. Its fully accessible with all major browsers and can be read by screen readers.