Remote web publishing dreams

Using a portable computer to publish a Web site used to be like eating the proverbial elephant for Intranet designer Brooks Martin. The Brentwood, Tenn., consultant took one bite at a time. And they were slow bites.

With a lethargic laptop and nothing but a high-end scripting application called Visual InterDev at his disposal, getting a site up and running from the road took “three to five times longer” than it does today.

Then Martin switched to a custom-built portable with a 266-Mhz processor, crammed with 128 megabytes of memory. He also trashed InterDev in favor of Drumbeat, a development tool that features user-friendly, drag-and-drop design functions.

Now, setting up a site remotely is painless and fast.

“It’s great,” he says. “If you’re point-and-click savvy, Drumbeat makes a powerful addition. You can do everything on your own without knowing any code. And the upfront investment is minimal.”

To business travelers who administer their Web or Intranet projects from afar, the Drumbeat promise may well seem irresistible. A program that doesn’t need all the memory of a big desktop PC, is easy to take on the road, and costs about $400 probably sounds unbelievable.

It is unbelievable.

For the last several weeks, I’ve tested Drumbeat and several other Web-design suites for their usability and portability. The net result has been nothing short of extreme frustration.

The programs are, for the most part, memory hogs. In other words, even though they work on a laptop, they’re better off running on a tower with a generous hard drive. What’s more, while many of the products guarantee you’ll be building Web pages in minutes, the reality is that they take months to master.

I feel the most ambivalent about Drumbeat, which I’ve been using to redesign my home page. Getting set up was deceptively simple. I began manipulating text and graphics almost immediately. When I previewed the site, it looked like pro had built it. I was excited to find a program that made me look this good.

But what I saw wasn’t necessarily what I got. After I posted the data to my Web site, I discovered several troublesome incompatibilities between Netscape’s Navigator browser and Microsoft Explorer in the code. I tried to create a new set of pages to suit the Navigator crowd, but ended up accidentally deleting some of the original pages. When I tried to re-post the fixed site, I got an “illegal operation” error and the mandatory shutdown on my computer. So much for that.

Drumbeat adored my PC’s 400-Mhz processor so much that it consumed every bit of it and often still chugged along like the little red caboose. Speaking of chugging, the scripts created by Drumbeat were agonizingly slow, taking close to forever to download on my laptop, or worse still, they didn’t work at all.

As I write this, I’ve reached an impasse with the program. I want to throw it out the window along with my computer, but I can’t find anything better to replace it with.

Adobe’s PageMill is also long on shortcomings. It isn’t as easy to learn as Drumbeat, doesn’t offer the same precision drag-and-drop functions, and doesn’t import sites as seamlessly as its competitor. However, for $100 you get an extremely stable program that runs on a Macintosh platform (all new iMacs are now bundled with the software).

Another plus for frequent travelers, when it comes to PageMill, is the way it deals with downloading files to the Web. Unlike Drumbeat, which takes you through several screens of options before you can finally publish a site, PageMill does it quickly and without any needless backtalk. PageMill also lets you actually “save” your work, as opposed to the confusing “publish” function on Drumbeat.

Finally, PageMill isn’t as demanding on your system. It requires only eight megabytes of memory and a PowerPC processor, which covers practically every Mac on the market.

I also looked at the Windows-only HomeSite 4.0 from Allaire and had similar misgivings. HomeSite’s design interface looks a lot like Drumbeat’s, but it caters to the code-lovers among us. The original HTML source is only a mouseclick away, which is a feature I really liked. HomeSite also offered a spellchecker – something PageMill has, and Drumbeat doesn’t.

The problem with the Allaire application is that you have to run it with expensive server software called ColdFusion to get the same results you would from Drumbeat. Not only that, but I found myself having to consult the thick manual for a list of proprietary server tags in order to make the thing work. If your office wants you to do simple HTML pages, HomeSite works for me. At about the same price as PageMill, it’s a solid program. But business travelers probably shouldn’t mess with ColdFusion unless they have a very powerful portable and the patience of Job.

As a postscript to this discussion of Web design programs, I spent two hours yesterday evening on the phone with a tech support guy from Drumbeat in an attempt to iron out my site problems. He acknowledged that the current version of the program had some flaws. But once he saw my pages, and the absolute mess I’d gotten myself into, he confessed, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Hey, when I get into trouble, I really get into trouble.

Here’s what it all comes down to: If you’re on a PowerBook, I would try PageMill. Despite my bittersweet experience, I’d pick Drumbeat for the portable PC. And I’d go with the ColdFusion suite only if you’ve got some real heavy-duty scripting to do – but not on a laptop.

Better yet, leave the design work to another department. We may be ready for remote Web publishing, but it’s not ready for us.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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