71 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Getting better, but not suitable for every web site, 1 Feb 2005
This review is from: Contribute 3 (CD-ROM)
Contribute 3 improves mainly on its predecessor by having a better CSS rendering engine - your web pages are more faithfully displayed in editing mode. Contribute 3 is for non-technical web site owners to make changes to their site. I have found that clients have been able to work with it with very little training due to its consistent word-processor style layout once they overcome the how-to-make-a-new-page-and-link hurdle.
It is designed for use with static web sites rather than dynamic database-driven ones. It works well with static web sites when used with Dreamweaver templates, preventing users from editing sections that should not change. Further, I would not use this with a particularly large site, instead preferring to use a web-based content management system (CMS). Therefore I rarely use the new write / review / publish workflow feature.
As a designer you can restrict writers to using only the CSS styles that you have created, rather than being able to select any font, colour and size at random.
One drawback is the FTP speed - making a connection, checking for updated templates, synchronising, etc (slow even on broadband) - although it seems to have improved over the earlier versions. When publishing it is too common to get an error message but retrying tends to work.
You may want to check the license before buying an OEM copy - ours from another supplier had a "Not for commercial use" message on the splash screen.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So Simple So Excellent, 28 July 2005
By A Customer
This review is from: Contribute 3 (CD-ROM)
I used a trial version of this software and loved it to bits, i had a little experience in web design in terms of basic programming, but this makes you wonder why bother with the different languages. If your looking to get into web design but get bored of all the usual other web design packages with the same old design and interface, try this beleive me you will be surprised at how easy it is to get to grips with.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Contribute confusion, 7 Feb 2007
This review is from: Contribute 3 (CD-ROM)
I find this a very annoying programme to use. It lacks some really simple but important tools. For example there is no way of checking for dead hyperlinks. Additionally the design screen doesn't follow the WYSIWYG fromat, what you see isn't necessarily what you get on the published page! This is really frustrating in that you keep having to swap between the design draft and the published page to see if its behaving. Quite often its not, for example large blank sections appear in the page and any images may not be where you laid them out in the design draft. Get it together Macromedia!
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