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Hey everyone, the good folks over at Bluehost.com are offering my readers 42% off web hosting if you signup by January 31, 2015. As you know, Bluehost is now my preferred hosting service and I have successfully moved my sites there with no issues to date.
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After posting my last update about how I had built my photography website with Adobe Lightroom and plug-ins from The Turning Gate, I started getting questions like: “Could you build your site with Adobe Muse CC?” Of course the answer was always “yes I could, but…” There was a big reason that I built this particular site with Lightroom instead of Muse. I’m always updating my photography galleries with new photos and removing older photos. I manage all of my portfolios and this process with Collections in Lightroom. With the Web Publishing Bundle from The Turning Gate I’m able to update those galleries at any time with the click of the “Publish” button right in Lightroom. However, on the other hand Adobe Muse would allow me to customize the look and feel of the site more easily and basically do anything I wanted on any page at any time without having to write code or CSS.
The more I thought about it the more I figured I could have my cake and eat it too. I could build all the non-gallery pages (Home, About me, Contact, etc.) using Adobe Muse and use Lightroom and The Turning Gate plug-ins to continue to update the galleries. It would take a little more setup up front, but once the work was completed I would have the ease of updating the galleries anytime that I like right from Lightroom AND the ease of customization for the rest of the site using Adobe Muse.
I set out to complete this task this past weekend and I put the new site up (terrywhitephotography.com) on Monday. As with any new site I’m still tweaking things here and there, but I’m LOVING IT so far! I built a standard Adobe Muse site with all three layouts (Desktop, Tablet and Phone) and I also made sure to include the pages that would need to be in the menu, but not actually built in Muse (Galleries, Videos, Tutorials and Buy Prints). Using the trick of Excluding those Pages from the menu allowed me to put custom links in to the Galleries and Videos pages produced by Lightroom/The Turning Gate. I also had to modify my Lightroom produced pages to point back to the main site when someone clicks on home, about and contact.
I’ve anticipated at least some of the questions you may have, so here we go:
Q. What did Muse let you do that you couldn’t have done with The Turning Gate?
A. The first one was I’ve always wanted a full screen slideshow on the homepage of the desktop layout. It was so easy to do this with the Widgets in Muse and I’m not sure if there was an effective way to do this in The Turning Gate AND have the slideshow work the way I liked.
Q. Your older site was “responsive” and currently Muse isn’t. How did that work out with this website makeover?
A. Well the pages from Lightroom/The Turning Gate are still responsive and therefore when you click on my Galleries page on a mobile device you still get that experience. However, for the rest of the pages made with Muse I was able to optimize the content for Desktop, Tablet and Phone just the way I wanted. So it works out fine.
Q. If you had to do this from scratch, which Turning Gate Plug-ins would you need?
A. Since you’re going to need at least 3 of their plug-ins (Gallery, Auto-Index and Publisher) you’re still better off going with the CE4 Web Publishing Bundle as it will include everything you need for one price.
Q. Will Adobe Muse ever be “Responsive”
A. I get that question a lot and Adobe Muse improves rapidly with new features. Since “ever” is a long time, I would guess that you’ll see the features that people demand the most at some point! (how’s that for a non-committal, keep my job kinda answer?)
Q. Since you’re using Adobe Muse to create the home page and the full screen slideshow, what happens when you want to update it?
A. I did give up the ability to update the homepage slideshow with Lightroom automatically, but since I don’t update it as often I’m ok with exporting images from Lightroom manually when I want to update that one slideshow.
Q. What if I want to add music to my Muse site, HTML 5 video (like you did with the Turning Gate) or even have a template to get started with, what can I do?
A. I have really been impressed with MuseThemes.com. They make a variety of add-ons for Muse including widgets and templates that take Muse beyond the standard set of functionality. They (like most 3rd party add-ons) fill in the gaps.
Q. Will you be adding more Muse features to your site?
A. Yep, now that the hard part (which wasn’t so hard) is out of the way, I can add more features from Muse and use this site to showcase what can be done with Adobe Muse over time. I’ve already take advantage of the full screen slideshow, full width slideshow, SVG support, contact forms, social widgets, composition widget (for my phone menu), menus, TypeKit fonts, custom hyperlink colors, transparency and of course some gratuitous use of scroll effects 🙂 .
Your site is only as good as the web hosting that serves it up to your visitors. So far I couldn’t be happier with Bluehost.com. I was originally turned on to them by The Turning Gate and now they now host all my websites.
In this episode of Adobe Creative Cloud TV, I’ll show you how to get started with Adobe Muse CC and the 10 things that beginners want to know how to do. Although I have done this subject in the past I felt that enough has been added to Muse since then to do this video again.
See more of my Adobe Creative Cloud Videos on my Adobe Creative Cloud TV and get the App below. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version on the Amazon App Store:
In this episode of Adobe Creative Cloud TV, I’ll show you the 5 major new features of this latest November 2013 update to Adobe Muse CC. Photographers will LOVE the last feature I show! See how this visual web design tool has just gotten a lot better.
See more of my Adobe Creative Cloud Videos on my Adobe Creative Cloud TV and get the App below. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version on the Amazon App Store:
In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast, Terry White shares 5 Tips for Adobe Muse users. Many of these tips are from the recent late February feature update. If you use Adobe Muse, you definitely want to watch this episode!
See more of my Adobe Creative Suite Videos on my Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and get the App below. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version on the Amazon App Store:
In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast, Terry White shows photographers how they can take advantage of their Adobe Creative Cloud Memberships and the hosting included to publish Web Galleries directly from Lightroom 4.
See more of my Adobe Creative Suite Videos on my Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and get the App below. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version on the Amazon App Store:
In case you haven’t noticed this site was updated with a “responsive” design a couple of weeks ago by the very talented web designer Erik Bernskiold. With the use of custom CSS he has made it so that the same site/content is displayed nicely no matter what screen you’re viewing it on. If you’re looking at this post on your computer go ahead and give it a try by simply resizing the window to be more narrow from the right. The page will respond and the content will scale or readjust as needed all the way down to a smartphone size. The same goes for my BestAppSite.com While I have the good fortune of Erik working on my terrywhite.com and bestappsite.com sites, I have other sites that I maintain myself. My Terry White Photography.com site is also now responsive thanks to an update to the The Turning Gate Lightroom Plug-ins that I use to generate my photography site. At last my photography site also looks even better on desktops, tablets and smartphones. The fun doesn’t stop there. I use Adobe Muse to author my MacGroup.org site and using Adobe Muse I was able to add both Tablet and Smartphone layouts to that site. Adobe Muse doesn’t currently offer responsive design, but it does offer the ability to create tablet and smartphone friendly layouts. There are pros and cons to both and here’s a great article that weighs in on the Responsive vs. Mobile Layout Debate. With that said, the MacNews blog (blog for MacGroup-Detroit) is now Responsive thanks to a template update by Page Lines.
Like I said, I have Erik to work on my major sites that don’t require as much day to day design updating as my other sites and thanks to Adobe Muse, 3rd party WordPress plug-ins and The Turning Gate I can have a good mobile experience on all my other sites. I’m in no way a “professional” web designer/developer, but I do have websites to maintain. If you’re wanting to make your site Responsive and you don’t have an “Erik” you should check out the new Adobe Edge Reflow tool. If you want to build your own sites with mobile layouts, check out Adobe Muse.
In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast Terry White shows how to Get Started Designing Websites with Adobe Muse – The 10 Things Beginners Want To Know How To Do. See a complete workflow from start to finish.
See more of my Adobe Creative Suite Videos on my Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and get the App below. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version on the Amazon App Store:
In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast Terry White shows you how to create a dynamic sliding menu for your mobile website in Adobe Muse.
See more of my Adobe Creative Suite Videos on my Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and get the App here. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version on the Amazon App Store:
In this episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast Terry White shows how to incorporate Adobe Photoshop (.PSD) files in your Muse Website and how to create buttons with hyperlinks.
See more of my Adobe Creative Suite Videos on my Adobe Creative Suite Podcast and get the App here. It features EXCLUSIVE CONTENT that no one else gets to see. This episode has a BONUS CLIP that is available only in the App! My iOS App is a Universal App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. I also have an Android version:
