Google Web Designer (2013)
google.com
google.com
_Just_ as the list of templates started getting interesting with some Youtube slider-thing integration, it came to an end. So yeah, this seems to be aimed at folks who need to build ads quickly and don't want to have to be HTML5 pros.
With that said, there's a "my templates" feature so maybe you can use it to maintain your Star Trek fan website, or business portfolio website, too. I'd just hesitate to recommend that in general, as my experience with GUI HTML5 builders has been that they aren't the best IDEs or text editors and I really quickly start to need one in order to be efficient.
[0] https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easi...
They are not going to wag themselves, so it only makes sense to include Google's ad template into Google's editor for creating Google Ads :)
(I guess half of this comment that's not a joke is it looks like internal tool gone public for mostly PR opportunity.)
Do as we say, not as we do, always a credible way to run a business.
Certainly don't want anyone else getting better ad positioning than Google, no sir. That's a penalty.
Last modified: April 14, 2014
>Build beautiful HTML5 creative with ease.
creative what - repeated later, "However, even though the amount of mobile and tablet work is expected to increase, cross-screen creative can be difficult to adopt".
This just hurts so much. They don't want to call it "content" because ... it doesn't qualify as such? It's just -- "some creative."
If it were a noun instead of an adjective it would seem okay for me but this is just too marketing.
I suppose just an upvote would suffice, but I had to applaud you.
When reading the link I quoted from, I actually didn't realize it was talking about ads. I thought it was talking about any kind of content. I do wonder about something. I thought that Mobile platforms have a distinct advantage in displaying ads, in that most people (for example me) do not run any form of ad blocking on their mobile devices.
If this is true - and if the page a bit upthread that I'm talking about and quoted from is talking about ads - then when doesn't that page mention this advantage at all? (From the advertiser's perspective.)
No, that's wrong. "Creative" is professional jargon, it refers to the content of the ad when divorced from the medium or the delivery channel.
But otherwise "stuff" is an ambiguous term and "creative" is industry jargon.
"We have to work on the creatives to show to the client next week."
and
"We have to work on the ads to show to the client next week."
(in the way that a programmer could just as easily write, "I have to make some changes to the code" and "I have to make some changes to the program.")
? If, however, you're not equally likely, is it because the second one has some different meaning? What is that different meaning?
This is way less awful than KPIs, by the way.
You're overthinking it. It's not akin to saying "electronic computer program"; it's akin to a programmer saying "code" as opposed to "software" or "an app." It's a building block, just as a piece of software often requires front-end and back-end development, the "ad" is in reference to both the creative element on its own and the mechanism that puts it there.
>I work in marketing, "creative" is used for pretty much any kind of ad/marketing product while in the production process.
that it was limited to ads. I didn't realize it would also be used for other things.
> the "ad" is in reference to both the creative element on its own and the mechanism that puts it there.
This is interesting, thanks. But what I was trying to get at, is to make sure you guys aren't confusing each other, are you careful to use 'creative' instead of 'ad' (since the latter can include the mechanism)? Or is this not a distinction you're careful about?
I'll give you an example - programmers are careful to say "binary" or "executable" if they want to talk about the program as compiled as opposed to as written (source code).
so is "creative" also something that you would use to be careful to distinguish the "creative element on its own" as opposed to the mechanism?
It sounds like your answer is yes, that's correct - I'd just like to get a confirmation.
"Our creative review process is taking too long."
"Can you pull all the ads for that creative?"
"How good the creative is matters a lot more than how you deliver it."
(I haven't worked in ads since 2012, though, so my memory of the jargon may be off.)
The others are clear.
It smacks of desperately wanting to be hip and cool.
It's just industry jargon that evolved over time. It's used because it compresses a key industry concept.
There's about as much motive to use the term "creative" to sound cool in advertising as there is to make "dongle" sound sexual in consumer electronics.
Including this: "a new JavaScript API in Google Chrome, called Intersection Observer, which provides viewability measurement for your mobile and desktop web placements without the need for Flash. Built directly into the Chrome Browser, Intersection Observer improves viewability coverage for all video and display formats across screens by solving technical challenges associated with mobile viewability measurement. It also provides faster browsing and less battery drain, improving the consumer experience."
I don't use a web browser built by an ad company, but what does this mean in human language?
It's actually pretty hard to detect except through indirect means, one of which was to use a flash object to monitor for framerate changes. On-screen objects would render with a higher framerate. Google seems to have built out an API so that you can just explicitly check.
For marketers, this is actually a big thing because it means a key success metric (did people actually see your ad?) can be measured more reliably.
You can disdain advertising or marketing in general and you'd have a point, but what you quoted is actually describing a well thought out solution to a common industry problem.
This stuff is all geared at advertisers who want better tools for designing ads and landing pages, and publishers who want to create ad supported sites more easily. So they are using industry jargon that people in the space (like myself) will be familiar with. Yes it is "marketing to marketers" (not sure about the lesser remark), but that doesn't make it any less specific.
I'm not sure which specific page you are referencing, but this is all technical advertising jargon that means very specific things.
"Viewability" is a technical term referencing whether an impression is viewed by a user. As advertisers increasingly demand more transparency around ad inventory quality from publishers, viewability is a newer metric that the industry looks at. Here's a good starting point from the IAB for how they classify it [1].
Determining whether an ad has been in view has some technical challenges which you might be familiar with if you know much about front-end stuff. At a quick glance of your quote, this references improving the way a pages viewability of ads is measured on mobile by removing the need for Flash for sites to signal "hey, this ad impression is viewable (and thus more valuable)!" Flash bad, this good.
Here's some further reading[2] on the technical challenges from a company that handles inventory where these metrics are a factor.
Look, we get it, you don't like marketing. And yeah, my industry can lay it on thick sometimes, but this is about as poor an example of that as it gets.
[1] https://www.iab.com/guidelines/state-of-viewability-transact...
[2] http://productblog.appnexus.com/evolution-of-viewability-mea...
That said, this is largely about decrapifying the web (getting rid of Flash is a good thing right?) and the parent also crapped all over a profession and industry while proving to be rather uninformed about it. So no, a little negativity isn't called for.
What happens is people only associate advertising with marketing, which is really only one piece of it. Furthermore, they take one type of advertising, with data-hungry and sometimes intrusive online ads, and extrapolate their negative feelings towards that to ALL of marketing. Thus, anyone involved in marketing is a lesser person than them.
Advertising itself is not a bad thing, it's a critical part of any capitalist society. I just don't understand how we got to the point where seemingly every ad is as annoying as it could possibly be, that every ad company is just in a race to the bottom of "how can we be as intrusive and unsubtle as possible."
But I get what you're saying. I feel the same. But like I said, there must be a reason.
Marketers aren't dumb.. they wouldn't invest so heavily in this if it wasn't effective.
Those are two different distinct forms of marketing, one of which I have no issue with, other than my impending financial ruin.
So they're just unethical? Your logic can be used to justify a bunch of terrible things.
>Nobody enjoys getting raped, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.
>Nobody enjoys getting scammed, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.
>Nobody enjoys getting robbed, but it is still very popular.. why? Because it still works.
Well... That didn't last long.
Anyway, it's a really mundane piece of jargon. It's like you're rolling your eyes at people who use 'access' as a verb.
But below in this thread I asked for example usages and the person I asked said:
>"We have to work on the creatives to show to the client next week."
That does not match the definition you just linked.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/creative#Noun
it says "creatives" are people "some of the creative" (and the like) would be the things. It explicitly calls it uncountable in that definition. So does the wiktionary entry need expnasion, or was the example usage I received, wrong?
"Creative" as a noun meaning content shown in a single advertisement with the plural of "creatives" is definitely in use in the places I've worked, which include a magazine/traditional publisher and a silicon valley tech company that has a large market share of the advertising industry.
One advantage over other HTML IDE's is that GWD's output is generally readable code, which can be extended, rather than obfuscated proprietary (adobe) bullcrap.
All the developers that might do static frontends code by hand or use a library like Bootstrap or a theme like a WordPress theme. So there is not really much room for a tool like Dreamweaver in the landscape of web design. It's all about modifying existing things to make them fit the problem.
When it comes to the high-end, there are Mac apps such as Hype and Sparkle which are used especially for developers who want to create animated websites.
It's also the case that creating a webpage isn't the most important thing anymore. Many businesses only exist on Etsy and Facebook. The time when knowing what html is and knowing how Dreamweaver works meant you could make a living off of anyone who wanted to be "on the Internet" is kinda over.
They aren't entirely gone though, this was posted to HN a while ago: https://preview.webflow.com/preview/flexbox-game?preview=d1a... It's a game in their editor that teaches you flexbox.
we don't. webflow[0] is the best I've seen. there's an OSS clone called grapejs[1], but it's still very alpha. one reason we don't see greater adoption is that WYSIWYG editors for the web occupy a sort of middle ground between template-based hosts like squarespace, weebly, etc, and opinionated low-barrier-to-entry frameworks like bootstrap. I think there's some market, especially for prototyping, one-off marketing pages, and people who don't already have a preferred design workflow, but I don't think WYSIWYG will return in a large way until these editors begin doing "real" front-end lifting -- i.e., "drag and drop this react/vue/whatever component within a grid, without having to know what react/vue/whatever is." the appeal of dreamweaver, frontpage, and all of those editors in the 90s was that not everyone and their mother was a coder, but everyone and their mother did want to be on the internet, and there were none of the aforementioned saas or framework solutions to rely on. in 2016, there's no lack of coders and tooling, so if you don't want to write your own code, you may as well just spend the $10 for a shop overseas to turn your static layout into a responsive webpage overnight.
React Studio is trying to do that:
We've used WebFlow for a couple of years; it doesn't suck and you can actually build an early stage [pre-rev] business with it before committing to a full stack team/budget.
HTML/CSS WYSIWYG editing from mathematician point of view:
Second main task of a browser is: by having given HTML/CSS to produce set of pixels on window's surface.
On other side WYSIWYG editor is aimed to solve opposite task: from desired set of pixels (those ones you want to get) to restore/produce acceptable HTML/CSS combination.
The problem is that the task can be accomplished only with pure HTML. As soon as you add CSS to the equation acceptable WYSIWYG becomes barely possible: the same set of pixels (rendering on the screen) can be achieved in many different ways. Layout can use floats, absolute positioning, flexes and grids recently, etc.
Direct task (rendering) is perfectly formalize-able and solvable (HTML5 and CSS specs) - we have at least three independent implementations of these formalizations.
But opposite task (HTML/CSS structure synthesis from given image) has no determined solution.
And so different WYSIWYG systems use different approximations.
Like Microsoft Word, it produces HTML/CSS documents that are pretty close to what you just saw in it, but that HTML/CSS is barely readable and reusable as HTML/CSS. Others produce readable HTML but rendering is far from what you want to see.
Therefore "ideal" WYSIWYG editing of HTML/CSS is not achieavable in principle. You need to give up something - either WYSIWYG quality per se or feature set. Like you can have WYSIWYG editing but for editable text alike islands: content area of your blog site for example.
> Therefore "ideal" WYSIWYG editing of HTML/CSS is not achieavable in principle.
I think users just need to be (made) aware that any & all web pages' design is always "template/theme"-driven. Even in the absence of CSS: the browser then falls back on its unique user stylesheets / factory defaults (black Times in unpredictable font-size on white background, unless maybe hi-contrast accessibility setup has the colors reversed, unless, unless, etc..)
MS Word-style "WYSIWYG" looks like a "simpler" problem in this respect because a piece of paper is a piece of paper (not really though as printing settings can easily mess with what what-they-saw-they-thought-they'd-get). Any sane web-page WYSIWYG must separate the content-formatting-without-tags (bold/italic/a picture floating to the right/etc) from style editing --- so will be essentially (at least) really "2 editors" (in 1).
Now as the user quickly grasps this intuitively after just a bit of tinkering, I don't really see the issue anymore?
I chose to solve this by using Sketch, which has rich layer information - is it a text, is it centered, is it a rectangle, what is its background color etc. Sketch also has layer names, which can be mapped to component oriented CSS. The difficulty is in finding the optimal positioning for this, which we solve a little algorithmically and also through user annotations. You can read more about my approach and its trade-offs here: https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/protoship-uipad-design...
Easier than caption generation? - There's only one possible outcome for HTML/CSS --> website look - And we know what this outcome is (just render the thing) - not a lot of "words" in the vocabulary... there are only so many tags and styles we can use (at most a couple hundred), with most of the complexity coming from the combinations of these elements
But in some sense, it might be a harder problem, since the idea of web development is combining these "words" in a way that makes sense. So there might be a harder-to-learn grammar.
WYSIWYG requires a fixed layout size, which was common back when dreamweaver/frontpage were around.
And there are still issues like css being polite suggestions rather than rules a browser has to follow. Firefox recently introduced a readability mode for instance.
That's wrong, and analogous to saying that people who understand low level programming don't need IDEs.
Different screen sizes and WYSIWYG use are orthogonals. Any WYSIWYG editor worth its salt has supported media queries, previewing on different screen sizes, breakpoints, etc for ages.
Adobe Edge is dead.
https://www.adobe.com/products/edge-animate.html
Note: As of November 2015, Edge Animate is no longer being actively developed.
Prior to cessation of development it stagnated for a few years before finally being put down. Shame, really.
Now add in progressive enhancement.
We're not dealing with the largely fixed desktop viewport anymore.
That I suspect is why WYSIWYG hasn't taken off, Dreamweaver did quite well, but then the web ran away to multi-platform as the default.
There is also Sketch, which is a vector design tool that shines at designing user interfaces. And unlike Photoshop, it is extremely friendly to the web - if you can do something in Sketch, that can be done in CSS.
We're building a tool that converts these designs into code (HTML, CSS, SASS, React, ERB etc). That gives a sort of WYSIWYG workflow for pro users. You can have an expert designer do your design, and then have a developer run with it by generating quality code from them.
release notes: https://support.google.com/webdesigner/answer/7218073?hl=en&...
HN post when it launched: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6470426
At this point they probably have a small team working on it for sake of their ad division but people here shouldn't into this too much.
My next biggest concern is that these tools don't really teach people much about how the web works and also that marketer-types tend to over-use these tools with their new-found 'skills' and build over-bloated sites.
HTML is easy.
The templates are all for banners and the tools for making say a "div" are not there.
Not sure if anyone's heard of Readymag[0], but I'm really impressed with their editor - and it has excellent typography tools and UI.
Anyway, what I've noticed is that now many people are abandoning their own websites & blogs in favor of a centralized service such as Medium, Instagram, etc.. I remember a few years ago there were alot of fashion bloggers and now they're all on Instagram, updating daily. People have lost interest in designing, building, maintaining their own sites because it's too much work for the average person. Not to mention traffic going to the individual sites are neglible compared to social media. When posting a photo on your own site gets 10 visitors, but that same photo garners hundreds of likes on somebody else's platform, then you're going to be spending time on that platform.
Also, what if google decides to shut this down suddenly someday? Will it be easy to switch a project to a different software then?
An intuitive easy to use WYSIWYG editor is a highly sought afterand demanded product category. Squarespace costs money and is actually (for me) a pretty bad user exp.
Google probably can deliver on this because they are SEO. Even good editors were not semantic. I havent tried this product, but if it is halfway decent it will find market share. If it is perfect it could replace wordpress.
I am pretty competent as a developer and I would use (based on my understanding from the link) this product rather than battle css or compile sass. Plus I can edit the code.
On top of top teir engineering, google has control of SEO & pagerank so maybe they can win where orhers hadnt. No brainer for them.