I am a creative marketing and strategic marketing consultant with a real focus on website design and graphic design as well as photo retouching.

I decided to give Adobe Muse CC 2015 a try as my skill base is design rather than coding (although I am now getting to grips with fairly basic HTML).

Generally Adobe Muse is a great tool for a designer, and anyone who has a good grasp of Adobe InDesign will find it very intuitive to use.

However, there are some limitations and in my view these are:

• It would be great if you could draw other shapes rather than just rectangles/squares.
• You cannot copy content across from one format to the other without laborious copy and paste ie from say desktop to tablet and/or phone.
• It really is time Adobe developed Muse with the option to produce a fully responsive site rather than the designer having to create 3 different versions.
• The images placed in Muse do not look clear until you preview the page or the site in the browser which is somewhat disconcerting to begin with.
• Site wide link properties do not always seem to be reliable and need to be checked in preview mode.
• Search engines do not seem to really like Muse sites after publishing citing scripting etc issues.
• You must remember to create your own robots.txt file.
• You must remember to create bespoke 404 etc. pages (if you want them) and add to your .htaccess file.
• A text only based composition/sideshow widget would be really useful.
• Forms widgets really do need a file attachment capability.
• A lot of the free MULIB (Muse library files) I downloaded do not work in Muse CC 2015 which is disappointing and frustrating.

In reality Adobe Muse is definitely a step up from those online website builders offered by Weebly and others as it gives you far more design flexibility, most notably the ability to position items exactly where you want them on the page and to have absolute control over the spacing between items. Also, of great importance as far as I am concerned is the ability to use layers, parallax scrolling, pinning, anchoring and the many other features offered by Muse.

In conclusion, if you are a graphic designer you can create some really beautiful eye catching websites using Muse but it definitely has its limitations.

Date: 5 August 2015