I have a hard time recommending or discouraging buying Contribute without explaining what it is both good and bad at.

To start with, this is NOT a program for building web pages from scratch. If you need to truly build a web page, use Dreamweaver MX. On the other hand, if you want to maintain a pre-built site or make a site out of the many professionally designed templates provided, Contribute is an excellent tool.

I purchased Contribute when I was contracted by a local company to build a web page and give them the ability to perform daily updates without deep technical skills. I had originally planned to build and deploy the site with Contribute to ensure that the owners of the site would have no difficulties in the future. I quickly ran into the many limitations of Contribute.

First off, the actual HTML is completely hidden. There is no way to directly edit the code from within Contribute. You can use an external editor but there is no way to see your changes live without going though a save, exit external editing, look, return to external editing sequence. While I consider this an omission, this is a feature for most of Contributes target audience because it's easy to really mess things up in HTML if you don't know what you are doing.

The second omission can only be described as a flaw. Within the design portion, there is no way to perform a "Save As" of your page. Once you have made changes to a page you have only two options - Publish and Save as Draft. Publish overwrites the previous version and Save as Draft prevents changes to the page until the draft is published. The end result is that you cannot make multiple copies of a page to use as a template, you can't test how something works without being destructive and you can't save older versions for historical purposes. This flaw is compounded by Contribute saving your files under a series of folders with a naming convention understood only by the creators of the program. These flaws alone prevent me from giving Contribute more than 3 stars.

On the positive side, Contribute has some very powerful tools that are implemented in a very novice friendly way. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript additions, eBay site building, Google Search and PayPal payment boxes are a mouse click away. The Windows version includes a powerful FlashPaper2 utility that makes documents web friendly and the Mac version is tightly integrated with Apples .Mac service.

Where Contribute really shines is in editing an existing site that has a full administrator using Dreamweaver. The Publish and Draft functions are tied into Administrator, Publisher and Editor roles to ensure that what is on a site is what should be there. For an office that has many parts that need to add to a site, Contribute is ideal. For a small company wanting to get on the web fast or an eBay seller wanting to go beyond the default, Contribute is more than enough. Beyond that, move up to Dreamweaver.

Brand	Adobe
Rating	3 (9 ratings)
Price	$N/A
Category	Macromedia

Macromedia Contribute 3.0 Win/Mac

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