Jason Ellis wrote:

The more I use VSD, the more I develop a love/hate relationship with it. I love the ability to design visually, the way I used to do when I was designing printed publications. I love the simplicity, and I actually love how clean a code it generates (usually WYSIWYG editors generate nasty code). However, I hate it when I try to do something and find that I can't do it with the features VSD offers.

So here, now, is my list of "you could make my life a LOT easier" requests...

1) Master pages. Every desktop publishing software I've ever used offers master pages. And VSD really works very similarly to a desktop publishing software (which is why I love it so much). But the lack of master pages really hurts it's functionality. If you've got a 30 page web site and you want to add a new link to your main menu, that means 30 pages to edit to make that happen. Yikes! These days, almost all web sites are designed with the same header and navigation on every page - so why not have the ability to set master pages? Something as seemingly simple as linkifying your main menu is very difficult because you can't create the internal links until the pages to be linked to actually exist, but once you've created all those pages now you have to go back and linkify every menu image on every page. Yikes!

2) The ability to hand-edit within HTML generated by the program. As an example... I had developed a web site and I desperately wanted to put javascript tooltips (you know - those things where you hover your mouse over a link in a block of text, and a little box pops up with information). I got the script working fine, and had no trouble using it in hand coding, but as soon as I tried to use it in my VSD-generated site, I discovered there was no actual way to put the required bits of javascript references into the VSD-generated href tags for each underlined link. I even tried pulling the page up in a text editor, adding the stuff I needed to add, and then re-saving it, but VSD just stripped it out again as soon as I loaded the page back into VSD to make other edits or changes. It would be really nice to have a little button to push that could load a text editor to add stuff by hand if you chose that VSD would then recognize as being ok to be in there.

3) Background color AND background image! You'd think this is fairly basic, but apparently it's not. The setting screen where VSD allows you to set your background makes you choose between a background color and a background image. Why? Basic HTML allows you to insert both (i.e. "body background="blah.jpg" bgcolor="#00000") and I'm sure there is a way to do it with CSS too. The reason this is important is that if you have a dark color background image, then the background color should be a dark color too. I have a dark color background image, but because I can't define both background color and a background image at the same time, the background if the image doesn't load just shows up white. Not good.

There are other little things, but those seem to be the big three for me.

Thanks for listening!

Viv @ Jewelcraft wrote:

VSD was aimed at NON technical users (like me) and as such was kept as simplistic as possible, for those out there who can code they developed HTML editor, I could not get past the starting gate in that one.
However, you can have a free trial version of html editor, and use it to edit the html code in your VSD pages BUT if you upload with VSD again afterwards it deletes all your changes.

Editing one link in 30 pages, i have had to do more than once, its a simple copy from home page, and then paste into the other pages (i select all links with shift key and paste them all in one go) takes a few minutes !

As to background colour / image you can have a background image on each page, and select a background colour (or image to match background) for outside the page which i believe actually is also behind the background image.

No criticism of your comments at all, they are all valid but i guess you are a more competent programmer / developer than the programs were intended for, personally anything more complex and i for one may not have coped, and developed my sites at all.

Tom wrote:
Then you are ready to design in the HTML Editor.

HIT THE DAM KEYBOARD WITH A HAMMER !