@filmographie Back when Adobe cut off access to Typekit, a lot of us had a lot of discussions about alternatives. I am totally with you about trying to do anything in Dreamweaver. I don't want to code, even though I am sure I could learn it if I had to. I don't want to be dependent on another web site for either my development or deployment, either. Because of this latest issue that keeps me from even opening Muse, I decided my best course of action was to go back to school (meaning to learn a new approach) and make use of tools that gave me the kind of design control I enjoyed with Muse. I also wanted to make sure that whatever I chose didn't do to me what Adobe did with Muse, so I wanted a solution that would be around for the foreseeable future. I also wanted something that would be even better than Muse for handling responsive design.
Muse was developed by the people who developed InDesign. For me, that made the learning curve a lot easier, because I was already using InDesign for print publishing and there were lots of similarities (like paragraph styles) that I could easily adapt to. If you think about it, Muse is really producing STATIC pages, just like InDesign does. It just produces more of them -- one for each breakpoint you define, and it harnesses some of the image resizing abilities from Photoshop to resize images appropriately for each breakpoint, without losing quality. There is NO dynamic content possible in Muse. There are no plugins to give you that either.
Precisely because I was FORCED to move on from Muse (because I can't open it, even using the fix talked about in this thread), I took a look at everything out there, what current needs are for design, speed, and functionality, and decided to make the leap into WordPress (now called Gutenberg), host it on a VPS managed server (so I don't have to worry about those issues or be dependent on some external cloud hosting setup), and go with a block theme that has responsiveness built into it and enough tools for me to have freedom in design. The theme I ended up with is Spectra One, and my page builder is Spectra (free) and Spectra Pro (more options). Full site editing (FSE) is now possible with block themes, which means you can set your global design (global colors, global fonts, custom blocks, etc.) and still turn it on or off for individual pages. The biggest arguement against this (in my opinion) is the WordPress security issue, but my hosting environment and my CDN provide a lot of protection for that, and a couple of plugins plus good site mainentance takes care of the rest.
I took an in-depth look at everything that is out there and this is what I decided was the best solution for me. I have full control over the things that are important to me, and can deliver dynamic content (essential for a blog, and most web sites today), as well as send bulk mailings from within WordPress to grow the audience. There is built-in sharing (so users can post blog posts directly to their own social media accounts) and permalinks that make it easy to post on other sites.
My Muse sites were beautiful and just what I wanted to create. But that was 7 years ago and times have changed. Muse creates pages that are more like posters (fixed content in assorted sizes for different viewports), but that's not good enough for anyone who wants serious attention and readership today. I also detest cookie-cutter solutions, and don't want my sites to look just like everyone else's, so I have to have a solution that gives me enough control over the design to please me and yet doesn't require me to write code -- even custom CSS.
I expect to have to spend around a week or two getting up to speed with my new tools, but once I have done that, design and content creation should go quickly. I won't have to design breakpoints anymore. Those are built in and the new block-based Gutenberg is totally designed for responsiveness and speed. Elementor does have a lot of features that were attractive to me when I did a blog in 2016, but it produces bloated code because it's not built on the WordPress core, like the Astra and Spectra products are. The overall industry is already shifting away from Elementor and Divi, and in a couple of months, a limited amount of full-site capabilities will be part of the core WordPress software, making it easier for anyone to design and maintain sites of all kinds.
There is a reason why WordPress accounts for almost half of all websites around the world, and now with block-based editing, I think everything that is NOT block-based will become essentially obsolete. I watched Muse for 4 years before it was mature enough for me to decide to use it. One year later, the EOL was announced, but I stuck with it because I was making 4 language versions of my original site and wanted to finish them before doing anything else. The delay was in verifying the accuracy of the translations. The design is otherwise identical.
So, right now I am planning on learning to use these tools in creating the blog, and then create a custom template for the static portions of the sites and make use of WordPress multisite management to clone them and then change the text. I don't want to code and I won't have to code. I know how to work with images, color and layout, and tools like loop builders allow me to create dynamic content (such as showing the latest posts on the home page, identifying other featured posts by category, having a sidebar that lists posts by particular criteria, etc. ) as well as static pages like contact forms and an "about" page. Lots to learn in terms of using the tools, but I don't think it will take long to create the fundamental design. After that, it's just content creation and promotion.
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