Adobe Muse Fundamentals

Introduction to Adobe Muse Fundamentals
Hello, and welcome to this course on Adobe Muse Fundamentals. My name is Jay Mcfarland, and I am so excited that you have decided to join me to learn more about this incredible program. Basically in a nutshell Adobe Muse is the ability to create incredible websites without knowing an ounce of code. You may want to even consider using Adobe Muse if you do know code because it is so quick and easy to generate these websites and to push them out. Adobe Muse is so intuitive, and you will be up and running in no time.

Creating the Website Plan
My name is Jay Mcfarland, and once again I want to welcome you to this course on Adobe Muse Fundamentals, and in this module we're going to talk about creating a website plan. Basically this is the process of determining what pages your website is going to have and how they will be laid out. So in this module first we're going to determine the outline for our website, and then we're going to use the Plan tab to actually create that outline. Now this is a very intuitive process, and I have to tell you that in determining how to best present this course I was stuck between whether or not I should show you how to create a master page and then how to create your Plan tab outline or should I show you the outline and then how to do the master page, and I've basically decided there's really no easy way to give that to you all in a line, so I'm going to show you how to do the Plan first. Then we'll go in the next module and we'll create our master pages, and we'll update our Plan with those pages. I've just decided that that's the best way to go about showing you these different concepts. So in this module we're really going to focus on the layout of our website, and then coming up in the next module we'll talk about how to create a master for each of those pages, and then we'll start taking a look at the different design elements on each of those individual pages, so coming up let's talk about how to determine the outline for your website.

Page Design Overview
My name is Jay Mcfarland, and I want to welcome you back to this course on Adobe Muse Fundamentals and this module on Page Design. In this module we're going to create a master page. If you remember in the last module we took a sheet of paper that had a layout of the different pages that our website is going to contain, and we duplicated that layout within Adobe Muse. The process was very simple and easy, but now all we have is a bunch of blank pages. We need to add some graphics, some pictures, and some buttons and different elements to those pages, so we're going to do this in two ways. First so that we don't duplicate a lot of effort by having to recreate the design on each page, we're going to create some master pages, and that's going to give us the elements that we want to appear on every page. That's going to handle all the work for us from one master design. Once we've created that master page, we'll then go into the individual pages, and we'll figure out how to customize each of those individually so that your home page looks different than your menu page and your gallery page looks different than your menu page and so on, so let's go ahead and get started by creating our first master page.

Layers, Libraries, and Assets
My name is Jay Mcfarland, and I want to welcome you to this module regarding Layers, Libraries, and Assets within Adobe Muse. In this module we'll cover those three areas. First we'll talk about layers. This is the ability to place certain elements on top of others, for example text over the top of a picture. It's very important that you understand how those layers work; otherwise, your picture will display over your text, and no one will see it, so we'll cover that functionality. Then we'll also take a look at the different libraries available within Adobe Muse, the libraries that you build and also the libraries that they make available to you. And then finally we'll take a look at how to access all of the assets that you have within your website so that you can select them quickly and easily and also edit them as you go along. So, let's go ahead and start out this module by talking about layers within Adobe Muse.

Conversion to Tablet and Smartphone
My name is Jay Mcfarland, and I want to welcome you to this module on converting your website to be shown on a tablet or a smartphone using Adobe Muse. So, in this module we'll take a look at how to take everything that we've designed to be seen on a regular personal computer, and we'll make it so that if somebody views that site from a tablet that the experience will be better for them, that it won't be exactly the same as it is for the PC because for one they're going to be using touch, and the other thing is that they're screen isn't as big, so you don't want to lay out the information in exactly the same way. The good news is that Adobe Muse allows your web server to sense the type of device that is viewing the information, and it will decide which view that it should show them, but you have to go into Adobe Muse and tell Adobe Muse exactly how the site is going to be laid out for first tablets, so we'll convert the site to tablets, and then for smartphones, so then after we do that we'll convert the site for viewing on smartphones. So, let's go ahead and get started on how to convert our existing project into something that is better viewed on a tablet.

Publishing
My name is Jay Mcfarland, and I want to welcome you to this module on publishing the website that you've just created in Adobe Muse. Just like everything else with Adobe Muse Adobe has pretty much thought of everything when it comes to publishing your site, so in this module we're going to discuss three different ways to do so. First of all we'll talk about businesscatalyst. com. This is basically the website that is associated with Adobe Muse. You get free hosting with businesscatalyst. com along with your subscription to Adobe Muse. So, basically you can just upload your website to businesscatalyst. com and then if you like point your domain to businesscatalyst. com, and everything just works seamlessly. That happens to be how I do it for my own website. Then we'll talk about simply exporting your website as an HTML file. You can then take that HTML file and deploy it however you wish. And then we'll also talk about setting up your FTP to be able to export your site into an existing domain server that you may have set up already. So, let's go ahead and get started by uploading our site to businesscatalyst. com.