InformationWeek

GoLive 5.0, a Web-authoring tool, includes workflow features for designers and programmers who work jointly on Web pages. The software lets companies move HTML pages and JavaScript between GoLive and text-based HTML editors without changing the content and structure of the HTML source code.

"It used to be that designers would build the site and then hand it off to programmers," says Chris Krueger, a principal with Communication Wave Inc., a San Francisco Web-site design firm that has been testing GoLive 5.0. Programmers would then code the page and give it back to designers, who would make changes and sometimes "break the stuff programmers had done," Krueger says. "Now we can go and work on the page without wrecking what they did. It's much more efficient."

GoLive 5.0, which will be available in June for $299, has built-in support for streaming media so designers can drag and drop QuickTime objects and Flash files without the need for plug-ins. It also features a Dynamic Link function so users can pull data from Open Database Connectivity-compliant databases.

Illustrator 9.0, a design and graphics program, will let users apply transparencies to print and Web graphics during the design process with a click of a button. "Transparencies allow artists to add a lot of depth to the graphics. When you add one layer on top of another, you can adjust the transparency so you can see the layers below," says Rob Reed, a principal and designer at the Chopping Block, a New York graphic design firm that specializes in developing Web sites.

Illustrator 9.0 lets users create vector-based Web graphics, which are bandwidth-efficient, says Harley Manning, a director at Forrester Research. "If you don't need to have an extreme amount of detail and want to take advantage of smaller amounts of bandwidth, vector graphics are the way to go," he says.