Adobe Muse / Blue Skies Cleaning

Blue Skies Cleaning Service provides an excellent example of how Adobe® Muse™ software can help designers build attractive and well-structured sites for clients.

To make a visual connection to the earth-friendly cleaning concept while keeping the content area legible, the background image for the areas surrounding the page content is a wood grain texture while the page is a crisp white. Adobe Muse allows you to define a fixed-width page area with one background, and define another background for the rest if you wish.

Details like the graphic treatment of the page titles and customer quotes provide opportunities to visually express a client's brand the same way you would in a printed piece.

In Adobe Muse, you can give anything from a rectangle to a text frame a background image, much like the speech bubble contour given to the customer quotes on Blue Skies Cleaning's site. To make these backgrounds responsive to user interaction, use the States panel to swap background images on mouse hover or click. 

Blue Skies Cleaning's lists have a charming "sparkle" icon serving as their bullet points. Even though this image is used many times throughout the site, the browser only has to load it once — Adobe Muse knows not to create a new file for every image.

In addition, if an image is changed in Adobe Photoshop® or Adobe Fireworks® software, you can update it in the Assets panel and the changed image will appear everywhere, much like in Adobe InDesign® software.

Blue Skies Cleaning's design uses both sans-serif and serif typefaces, strengthening the brand's aesthetic with a touch of eclecticism.

Don't be afraid to experiment with your type in Adobe Muse — a combination of paragraph styles and character styles will make it easy to stay flexible as you adjust your mix of fonts. Style the text the way you'd like and then click the New Style button in the Paragraph Styles panel. Change your mind later? All you have to do is change a piece of text with that style and then click the Redefine Style button.

The care taken in spacing text and other objects in the Blue Skies site enhances the legibility of the site, making it easy for potential customers to read and digest the content.

Adobe Muse helps you stay consistent and precise in your spacing in two main ways: the Spacing panel and the dialog boxes for Site Properties and Page Properties. Define columns, gutters, margins, and padding for the page as a whole in the Site Properties and Page Properties; the Spacing panel then allows you to specify padding for individual objects on the page.

Add a customized contact form by using the arbitrary HTML feature in Adobe Muse. By choosing to upgrade your site to the Business plan with Adobe Business Catalyst® as your hosting provider, you can gain access to the Business Catalyst contact form builder and then insert as many forms as you'd like into Adobe Muse.

If you choose another hosting provider, the same principle applies — virtually any HTML code can be inserted into Adobe Adobe Muse beta testers have used everything from Wufoo forms to JotForm.