Adobe Muse Review

If you are a creative person, and want a website to showcase your portfolio, then Adobe Muse might be the website development and content management system (CMS) you’ve been looking for. This Adobe Muse review will help you decide if it is the right fit for you.

Adobe Muse is the website builder from the Adobe family. While the system is good, Adobe has decided that it will no longer develop new functions for the CMS (as of March 2018) and will cease support after 2020.

Whether or not third parties will stop developing functions, widgets and themes or offering support is unknown at this time.

This could make it difficult if you don’t have website development experience to maintain your website in the future. Therefore, those without the necessary experience should not consider this CMS. Those with considerable skill however might find a use for it.

For those who want to read on, this is what we thought of Adobe Muse.

Who Should Use Adobe Muse?

Adobe Muse is the perfect CMS for photographers, graphic designers and others who require lots of graphical images. This isn’t surprising considering it comes from the company responsible for some of the best creative suites available.

This is a great benefit for those who are used to Adobe Creative Suites. If you aren’t used to that system, then this might not be a great CMS option for you.

Building Your Adobe Muse Website

Adobe Muse was designed for those without any coding or website building experience. Therefore, the development team wanted to make it easy to use.

There are five toolbars within the design, each of these hide more options. The whole feel of the website designer is just like that of other Adobe programs like InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop.

So, if you have training on these programs, you won’t have a problem with this CMS.

The creation process is further simplified with an easy drag-and-drop editing principle.

Due to the primary target audience, there’s an impressive design toolkit included in the program. This marks the main difference between Adobe Muse and other website designers.

If you were using Wix, Weebly or other website builders, you would have to upload elements that are ready for publishing. Those using Adobe Muse have the additional option of creating elements in the program.

When you start building a website with Muse, you have to first define you site map, then you can work on your ‘Master page’. This is a template that keeps parts of your design on any page you create.

However, this is where one of the major problems with Adobe Muse lies: there are no free pre-designed themes. This means that you are building a website from scratch. This might sound like a great idea and does allow for a completely unique website.

The con of this however is that you can sometimes get stuck on the design of the website. The alternative to this is to buy a third-party theme. These can be expensive and there aren’t as many options as you would get with WordPress or Joomla.

Adobe Muse Functionality

Once your pages are designed, which can be time consuming, you can add widgets. There are numerous free options for you to choose from. There are also a lot of third-party options available.

All widgets are configurable and can be styled to suit the needs of the designer.

One of the best advantages we’ll mention in this Adobe Muse review, is that unlike a lot of other website builders, you can use Adobe Muse offline and then upload the changes later.

This can be a great little feature for those who live in areas where there isn’t a great internet connection, or those who like to work offline.

Another advantage of being offline, is that you can take your time about building your website, and when making changes. Without other CMS programs, you have to generally know that the changes you are making are good before making them, or work with a test site. This can be frustrating if mistakes are made. This isn’t a problem for those with Adobe Muse.

Adobe Muse Pricing

If this Adobe Muse review has inspired you and you want to give the program a chance, then you can try it free for 30 days. The free trial is a great incentive.

But the problem is that if you invest a lot of time in Adobe Muse, if you aren’t happy with the end result, it can seem like a waste of time and this can be frustrating.

In addition, the termination of Adobe Muse means that there are few options to purchase the final product. What programs are available would have similar pros and cons as we’ve highlighted in this Adobe Muse review.

Adobe Muse Review: Pros

• Adobe Muse is easy to use, especially for those who have used other Adobe programs before
• Adobe Muse offers flexibility and a lot of feature sets so your site can have a lot functionality
• Adobe Muse can be used offline
• A great free trial period of 30 days if you’re unsure about Adobe Muse

Adobe Muse Review: Cons

• Lack of future support for the CMS and the website design program
• For the best results, you need to have experience with other Adobe products
• No e-commerce or blog features, so you have to have a static website
• You have to design a mobile friendly website as Adobe Muse isn’t mobile ready straight away

Muse Review: Conclusion

Adobe Muse is one of the best website design and CMS programs for those who work within a visually creative industry. Those with experience of Adobe programs should find it easy to use this, but others might need additional training to use it.

However, if you are willing to give it a try, Adobe Muse can be a great option. The only issue is that Adobe Muse will not have support for users after 2020. So you’ll have to be pretty sure that you can handle any technical issues that may affect your use of this program.