The year was 1995. Alanis was at the top of the charts and I was fresh out of school, ready to be the best damn busboy that Denny’s ever saw. But then I read a book about HTML and suddenly I saw my future stretched out before me like a gleaming, golden turnpike of pure joy. Making Web pages was easy, fun, and people were actually earning a living doing it.

As time passed in the fast-paced Web world, I fell behind the knowledge curve soon enough. My expertise was basically limited to everything I learned in 1995, so it was back to Denny’s for me while the young turks hit the scene with their JavaScript, their CSS, and their aerobicized ASP. I continued to plug away at my tables and blink tags in SimpleText, but the girls kept swooning over the new Web studs and their fancy-pants technology.

I had nothing to look forward to but a life full of Moons over My Hammy, until a former busboy (now a wealthy “thought leader” in the Web community) took pity on me and slipped me a copy of the new Adobe GoLive, a WYSIWYG editor that he promised would change my life.

I’d never used anything except a text editor to code HTML — I’d even considered BBEdit too decadent for my Spartan warrior ways. I was convinced that WYSIWYG editors were for losers, and the bloated, awkward, screwy code that they created advertised that a mouse and not a man had built those pages. But, like my favorite wake-me-up-before-you-go-go lime green blazer and strappy tank top, my ideas were behind the times. While I once considered WYSIWYG editors to be the scourge of the earth, now some of them were valuable tools that could be used for good – or at least to get me out of Denny’s clutches. GoLive was ready for me, and I was ready for GoLive.

Up until the beginning of 1999, Adobe GoLive was known as GoLive CyberStudio, the flagship product of GoLive Systems Inc. and the most prominent WYSIWYG application designed for the Macintosh. Its solid following caught the eye of Adobe, which added GoLive Systems to its empire soon thereafter.

A few months after the acquisition, the new version of CyberStudio was unveiled as the newly-dubbed Adobe GoLive. More than two years later, Adobe GoLive is now going strong with version 5.0. This version is the closest thing yet to a full-featured Web editor from Adobe. We’re talking versions for both Mac and PC, a QuickTime movie editor, XML, ASP, SVG and dHTML support, plus integration with Adobe Image Ready, Photoshop, Flash, and WebDAV.

My first few encounters with GoLive were aggravating, since I had to adjust my entire approach to Web design. Before long, however, I was wooed by the time-saving features and the impressive site-management tools.

And now I’ve decided to throw together a quick site using GoLive to see just how fearsome its capabilities really are. I’ve chosen as my subject the obscure yet critically acclaimed techno band known as Orifex that I’ve become obsessed with lately.

In the pages that follow, I’ll be sharing my site-building experience with you. I’ll start by describing the creation of the basic site structure.