A the start of the learning curve - My take-problems-questions

[Its me Dave]

Down loaded Muse two weeks ago. CC member so it should be up to date. Windows 10.

Good morning I have been using Dreamweaver for years and of late with Bootstrap. I have just started a new website and decided to see what Muse could bring.

This left me confused, but please note I am new to Muse and it is most likely my misunderstanding of the purpose of the software or simply lack of knowledge, even after hours of searching forum, Web and watching I think all the training videos.

At first it looked good easy positioning of elements. Things mostly stayed where they were intended to stay, obviously no tweaking of CSS etc to get what I want.

After looking at all the videos and reading in the forums I took the advice and started with the phone layout first. The opposite of my practice in Dreamweaver.

I then copied to Tablet and got blank pages. I read in the forums that this was intentional as not all the content will be the same.

1. Why don’t I have the option? When 90% is the same I could delete what I don’t want much more easily than having to copy everything? Or would this cause a delete on all layouts. I realize I could use “Display None”, hence my next comment.

2. What happens to the content I don’t copy over? Is it listed as “display none” or is it not loaded?

I assume the first option. If so care needs to be taken as (I am assuming) larger content added for desk top will be loaded, but not displayed for Mobile devices. ??

As far as I understand you need a paid for system to do this that needs to be up dated as new end user products appear. The options I know off end up much too expensive for small sites.

3. Why can there not be a common mobile and standard menu as in Bootstrap?

For the phone menus I decided to use the Lightbox display with Accordion panels so each link was added manually. I took me days to learn how to do this and I ended up with a nicer menu with semi transparent pictures. I now need to learn how to save this as a widget so I can reuse. Huge time investment and probably detrimental to the load times so I may end up dropping it.

The choice here would be nice, the Bootstrap way or manuell. I know I could have bought this, but I wanted to learn.

4. When I add new content pages in Plan mode only the one layout (Phone, Tablet or Desktop) is changed. The tablet and desktop do not get the page added. I found this annoying as I am a terrible Website developer and often decide late to add pages or split content on to more pages.

The choice would be good when adding a page, add to all or just to this layout and if the content should be copied to all. Also the redesign of the Phone menu is a pain.

5 My big desktop images are nicely re-sized for Mobile etc. is the big desktop file downloaded or the reduced phone file?

I am sure a I dig deeper it will raise more comments or answer some. If any one has feedback on these or the same experience it would be good to get your answers/solutions as I am sure I may be missing some obvious things.

Thanks

[Guest · Accepted solution]

First I would ditch the "adaptive" approach and keep it simple...go "responsive". Almost everything is going that way. You will like it once you get it figured out. Being a Dreamwever user since Macromedia you will find some good and not so good things about Muse. Mostly good.

you will probably be seeing menus like you describe that are in bootstrap premade...check out some third party if you want but the show hide menu in Muse works fine. If it isn't a complex site go for text navigation clean and better for seo.

if you use natural flow in DW then Muse will make a little more sense in the responsive mode. Plus you can use combinations of fixed and fluid breakpoints.

Dreamweaver still produces much leaner code but Muse allows you to develop fast! A balance between getting a website done and up for clients at a more reasonable cost is attractive to many smaller customers.

Frankly, coming from more of a graphics background cresting websites in Muse is just more fun!

[Pavel_Homeriki]

1. Why don’t I have the option? When 90% is the same I could delete what I don’t want much more easily than having to copy

90% is not the same. This will have a different formatting. You will understand why, when you start practicing. You can ctrl + A, ctrl + C, on the desktop, ctrl + V, on the tablet or phone.

[Pavel_Homeriki]

2. What happens to the content I don’t copy over? Is it listed as “display none” or is it not loaded?

I assume the first option. If so care needs to be taken as (I am assuming) larger content added for desk top will be loaded, but not displayed for Mobile devices. ??

As far as I understand you need a paid for system to do this that needs to be up dated as new end user products appear. The options I know off end up much too expensive for small sites.

You can find out if you examine the source code of the page in the browser

3. Why can there not be a common mobile and standard menu as in Bootstrap?

Because there is no Bootstrap in the Muse.

For the phone menus I decided to use the Lightbox display with Accordion panels so each link was added manually. I took me days to learn how to do this and I ended up with a nicer menu with semi transparent pictures. I now need to learn how to save this as a widget so I can reuse. Huge time investment and probably detrimental to the load times so I may end up dropping it.

Right click / add to library.

4. When I add new content pages in Plan mode only the one layout (Phone, Tablet or Desktop) is changed. The tablet and desktop do not get the page added. I found this annoying as I am a terrible Website developer and often decide late to add pages or split content on to more pages.

The choice would be good when adding a page, add to all or just to this layout and if the content should be copied to all. Also the redesign of the Phone menu is a pain.

You must make a complete site in the desktop and only then activate the alternative layouts or breakpoints.

phone layout first.

This is a bad practice for Muse.

[Its me Dave]

A bit puzzled by your answer. I am using responsive mode also Bootstrap is responsive as far as I understand. I was curious if there was an adaptive element in Muse to cut load times on mobiles and this was the reason for the copy and paste.

Agree about the re-formatting, but now I have copy and paste and re-format. This may be because I am going from Phone up.

I abandoned Desktop down after advice I found in this Forum. I will now go back to this and try again. Once I have a few pages I will look at the code under different formats. At the moment it calls up href="phone/index.html" which caused me to ask. I had set the site to Fluid.

My site has three levels in the menu so I need some action to expose the levels as needed.

I checked that there is a <p>element in the link so the search-engines can follow. It is not like an un-ordered list, so I am a bit unsure of the SEO effectiveness.

I know there is no bootstrap in Muse, I was interested in the reasoning for not including a mobile menu automatically that I could reject or change. Seemed a short coming.

“Complete the site in desktop and then activate the alternative layouts.”

OK I am doing this and will compare the results.

Please do not feel I am attacking Muse I am just trying to understand! I have enough problems with DW especially with responsive forms.

I am sure I will end up using both dependent on the need or my ability.

Thanks for your time

Dave

[Pavel_Homeriki]

I think you should watch the video tutorials.

Create a responsive website |

https://musewidgets.com/collections/tutorials

[Its me Dave]

I know where things went wrong. I saw a video where the Plan had Phone and Tablet options.

Wondering why they did nor appear on mine I found how to add them. This seems to have taken me out of responsive (Fluid) mode. Wrongly it seems I had assumed it was a quick way of switching to the main master break points. In reality I had switched modes. Hence your comment on Adaptive. This plus the advice I found in the Forum to start with the phone layout took me in a totally wrong direction. As I was in Phone until I tried to add tablet all seemed fine. The set up still said fluid.

I have now left this alone and started again with Desktop and in fluid mode all works fine.

I totally messed up as I suspected. Thanks for you patience.