I've been using NOF since MX and have suggestions to improve the product. I'm not a power user, just someone with a business who needs a site, but I do know what the program can do:
- Even after using NOF for many years it confuses me what is going to take priority when setting style elements like page background, text formating HTML vs CSS. I'd like a simple hierarchy display that shows me what is affecting the appearance of my text and background.
- There are too many ways to alter the appearance of text and I'm not sure that if I set attributes in one area that they will be in another. Give me a simple way on one window to set my text attributes and put a check box indicating whether the attributes are specific to the selected text; just this page; or entire site. I hate jumping around back and forth between all the tabs and windows. - There is a lot of redundancy in the program that is confusing. Don't have so many places to make the same choices. Keep it simple and stratightforward.
- The photo gallery would be a very important feature and was wonderful several years ago but is woefully out of date. In addition there are weird quirks like the fact that all styles don't support resizing photos. The flash photo gallery tool is a programming disaster with all the tabs and sub tabs etc. Just start from scratch on that one and make the thumbnails much bigger. Drastically simplify both types of galleries even if it means losing some options.
- Most of the templates and flash graphics and nav bars in the program are out of date and need to be updated. I don't need a ton of choices but want some very good professional looking templates that can be easily customized with modern navigation bars. Also let me put longer text labels on my nav bars.
- In site view, let me assign a thumbnail graphic to a page not just a color and title. One of my sites has 500 pages and it's hard to remember what's on every page by just the title. Also a simple spreadsheet view of pages would be nice. I'd like to be able to sort by clicking on a column header by various attributes like: title, size of page, total upload size of page, last revision date, etc.
- Remove any references to out of date things like web safe colors and 56k modem upload times.
- Let me choose which fonts to display in a spreadsheet. I've got 100 fonts on my system and don't need to see them. Also make it easy for NOF to convert text in a non safe web font to a graphic.
- I think the future is going to be in widgets and using NOF as an assembly program to put everything together. It may be okay to scrap the photo gallery, store feature and some other features but make it easy to load these things and look like they are a native part of the web site.
- When I saw the email the other day about NOF v12 I was vastlyunderwhelmed by the promotional page on the web site. Still using the mountain graphics from 10 years ago and the promo page sample looks horrible. To make it worse, when I click on a feature to find out more, there is nothing to click, just some kid graphics on the page. Honestly, I think it ought to be a top priority to show the absolute best demos of what this program can do and I think NOF falls short on salesmanship. How about some videos showing the program in action too? How about a list of the 300 improvements? For now I don't have plans to get v12 as I'm not convinced that it's been cleaned up enough and the web site doesn't convice me to want to upgrade.