Adobe is currently at an interesting point in time for their business’ growth due to Flash usage declining while Creative Cloud subscriptions increasing. The company is now focusing more on creating content for the web in new ways instead of just relying on Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Illustrator (and/or Fireworks) as pretty much their only offerings to web developers and designers. Their recent offerings include Edge Animate, Edge Reflow, Edge Code, Edge Inspect, and Edge Web Fonts. I’m expecting sooner rather than later for these offerings to all get bundled together into one application, but for now they are all just bundled as separate apps inside of a Creative Cloud subscription. These are all pretty new offerings, but Reflow is the closest to visually editing websites that they’ve offered so far; even more so than Dreamweaver.

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Do you like to code? Do you like making templates? Do you know JavaScript and LESS? Squarespace wants these answers to be yes for their developer version beta, accessible at developers.squarespace.com. Squarespace is a great platform for people who want a quick website, with quite a few templates to choose from and all sorts of options with those templates for customization via their editor. Their developer edition allows for much more control over template options, so it seemed like they were looking to strike a great balance between code, control, and ease of use. If you can buy into their platform, then Squarespace should be the next platform for your site.

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Marketing is definitely a terribly powerful tool in this day and age of advertising. Just take a look at the fight between Samsung and Apple, Coke and Pepsi, GoDaddy and themselves, or Google. It works though, so when I went to UXPin.com I was intrigued to read on their site that their product is “Used by UX professionals working at these small, obscure companies:” such as Google, Yahoo!, Salesforce, IBM, Threadless, and Sony; if these corporations are using this as a solution then I would be curious to learn what exactly they use it for. Collaboration, which makes this app intriguing, is a great part of every good application now, but the trend I see seems to be that this add-on comes at a huge cost which translates itself into a user experience that I would describe as “over-designed”.

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For my independent study this semester, I’m researching how people who do not know anything about websites are able to make websites for the most part on their own and using a third party service. There are a ton, including divshot.com, squarespace.com, uxpin.com, and Adobe’s Edge Reflow Beta. For now though, let’s take a look at Divshot.

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Hello, welcome to my blog! This is basically where I test and archive all of my stuff, so feel free to look around. Unfortunately, it is powered by WordPress; more on that later. If you are questioning the site URL then I offer my congratulations.

Here’s a bit about me, and lets start in high school to provide some history. When the powers that be decided the course they needed to cut was the Advanced Placement Computer Science BC course, I was directly effected since that was supposed to be a perfect grade booster for senior year; also I might have learned something more about Java. Instead, my wonderful teacher decided to let us all take an independent study class with her, and gave us the freedom to create. Java was not really my thing but I knew I loved computers so I started to learn how to make websites.

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