While Illustrator and Photoshop share a well-known pedigree among graphic artists, it's the two Web-centric tools that promise to make this

a truly productive suite for designing Web sites. At the core is GoLive 4.0, a Web-site and page-creation tool. At a functional level, GoLive appears to have most of the bases covered. It has support for HTML 4.0 forms, Cascading Style Sheets, Java and JavaScript, the Extensible Markup Language, and cookie support that includes not only reading and writing, but the ability to pass the content onto scripts easily.

As the broad functional support suggests, GoLive is a powerful page-making tool, but it has a very distinct personality that makes certain kinds of users more likely to succeed with it than others. Web designers with a graphics background are likely to find the features they want close at hand. The interface and design metaphor will be familiar to anyone experienced in Adobe's graphics tools.

Designers who use a more cookie-cutter approach--that is, relying heavily on templates to handle design chores more or less automatically while they concentrate on text, navigation, and, often, database-driven content--would do better with products such as Adobe's PageMill or Microsoft's FrontPage. Web programmers also might be overwhelmed by the graphical nature of the program. While it includes a decent HTML editor, GoLive is really for visual designing, not writing code.

Indeed, GoLive is geared more toward the creation of innovative individual pages; consider it a sophisticated page designer, not a site editor. As with the template and programming issues, it's not the lack of basic features that makes GoLive less appealing as a site-management tool. You can, for example, drop pages from your design palette into an Explorer-like view of your Web site and even drag and drop whole folders to new locations and GoLive will automatically update links throughout your collection of pages. Rather, it's a question of focus. If you need complex site-management tools more than support for designing visually driven pages, GoLive will leave you wanting.

ImageStyler 1.0 is included with Web Collection as a bonus introductory package. ImageStyler is a good tool for creating buttons, toolbars, and other Web-page elements, often based on Photoshop graphics, which can then be imported into GoLive. It shares a common menu and tool-palette structure with the other products in Web Collection, which made it easy to move between the tools.

Given how much of Web design involves these lightweight images, ImageStyler makes a surprising impact on productivity by letting Web designers, rather than graphic artists, drive the creation these infrastructural images more easily.

Photoshop 5.0 was the first version of that graphics application designed with the Web in mind as a publishing medium. Photoshop 5.5, the version in Web Collection, extends its Web functionality, offering excellent flexibility for compressing images to GIF and JPG formats, and for comparing their quality with originals. Other strengths are that it can work in the Web color palette and understands GIF transparency and other image attributes common on HTML pages.

Photoshop 5.5's packaging and installation procedure includes Adobe ImageReady 2.0. Until now, ImageReady was a separate product, which allows even more flexibility in saving bitmaps to Web-compatible formats, creating image maps and slices, and designing JavaScript effects. ImageReady's image-manipulation functionality overlaps tremendously with Photoshop 5.5; perhaps with the next iteration the tools will be completely integrated into a single application.

Photoshop is fairly easy to learn, though the fact that Web Collection includes a Photoshop 5 manual and version 5.5 supplement doesn't help the process. The only problem with Photoshop 5.5, which I also had with previous versions, is that it doesn't gracefully handle system errors. For example, if your system disk (or your temporary file directory) becomes full during an image manipulation, Photoshop just shuts down. Save early and often, especially when manipulating large files.

Illustrator 8.0 is the latest incarnation of a powerful artwork-creation tool. Unlike Photoshop, Illustrator is geared toward the creation of vector-oriented (that is, line and geometrical-shape) art work, as well as font manipulation. Illustrator isn't geared necessarily toward Web designers; its role is for experienced artists to create icons, logos, or other original artwork. In the hands of a nonartist, Illustrator can create horrible images quickly and easily. Illustrator is also a complex application to learn and use. As such, it's something of a misfit in this collection. In most larger design groups, the folks using Illustrator are not going to be the people who rely on the rest of the Web Collection.

Even on relatively modest Intel hardware, Web Collection ran well, despite a lingering prejudice against this sort of platform among graphics professionals. We ran the four applications on a Compaq Presario 5610, with a 350-MHz Pentium II processors and 128 Mbytes of RAM. The Presario was running Windows 2000; the Adobe software is stated as being compatible with Windows 98 and NT 4; I experienced no oddities because of Windows 2000.

Although I evaluated Web Collection under Windows, Adobe also sells Macintosh versions of these products. I use two of the tools, Illustrator 8.0 and Photoshop 5.5, on a couple of Macs, a 400-MHz G3 iMac DV with 64 Mbytes of RAM, and a 450-MHz PowerMac G4 with 256 Mbytes of RAM. When working with both platforms, one of the benefits of Adobe's software becomes apparent: As much as is possible, the software is identical to the user, including menus and shortcuts. Files can also be shared seamlessly between the two systems. Just one word of advice: 64 Mbytes of RAM isn't enough. If you're using any of these Adobe products, you'll want a minimum of 128 Mbytes; I would recommend 256 Mbytes.

Web Collection is a powerful suite of tools, from artwork creation, graphics manipulation, and HTML page design, though Illustrator is really a tool for graphic artists, not Web professionals. Other than Illustrator, Adobe's tools are truly integrated into the Web-development process and would be appropriate for any site designer or Webmaster with artistic talent. And given the bundled price, one could think of Web Collection as just being Photoshop, GoLive, and ImageStyler--with Illustrator thrown in for free.