Ceneca: elegant offline publishing tools

RELease 1.0, Sept 18, 1995

This past January, Robert Seidl and three of his colleagues at Taligent left that company to launch a Web-tool startup called Ceneca Communications. Three of them had worked previously at Apple in the Pink project, which was spun out to become Taligent in a joint venture with IBM. They began coding in March and demonstrated their first application, PageMill, at the Boston MacWorld show last month; it was the hit of the show.

PageMill is a page-oriented HTML authoring and maintenance tool. You can download a version of PageMill for the Mac OS from the Web now, under betatest terms. (Ceneca creates its software on Macs; it is developing Windows and Unix versions as well.) When it is released commercially for the Mac in September, the product will retail for $200.

Part of PageMill's appeal is its smooth engineering. For example, when the developer drags an image onto a Web page, PageMill can automatically convert the image to a format of the developer's choice. A simple Image Editor allows authors to specify if their images should be transparent or interlaced. PageMill also automatically includes the image size in the HTML tag, which makes display on browsers quicker and smoother. Ceneca recommends that authors use applications such as Photoshop to get finer control over their images. (The beta version of PageMill doesn't support links inside HTML pages or JPEG images, but the full first release will.) PageMill includes a Pasteboard, which is a souped-up Scrapbook where developers can leave images for later use. PageMill does help authors create forms interactively; it doesn't help with CGI scripting.

A site for sore eyes

Ceneca's second product, SiteMill, includes PageMill and adds link management, clickable image-map- and form-creation tools, navigation tools and automatic link checking. It should enter beta testing soon, and will retail for $800 when it ships at the end of October. Customers who upgrade from PageMill to SiteMill will pay only the difference.

SiteMill doesn't add any special code to a Web server. Developers must FTP finished files to the destination server themselves. It does help manage the links. If a site is to be moved to a DOS server, for example, SiteMill can rename the links to comply with the 8.3 naming convention. The program doesn't have a bird's-eye Website view; instead, it has simpler displays that list inbound and outbound links (in the Site and External Views). There is an Error View, which shows broken links. Correcting a link in that view cascades to all the instances where it occurs.

Ceneca's designers favor simplicity over feature richness. Developers who want to see the raw HTML will have to use an ordinary text editor. SiteMill also doesn't offer templates, tables or extensions such as Java, Macromedia or QuickTime. Some of these decisions may change over time, as the system evolves. Adobe Systems recently announced its intention to purchase Ceneca.

Getting there

Ceneca's Web creation tool suite is similar to Vermeer's. Seidl and his partners debated becoming Web service providers as well as pursuing other business models, but they decided instead to make a product oriented to a specific audience with a clear need. Their intended audience is corporate marketing communications departments, advertising agencies and others whose task is often to put companies on the Web, but whose staffs are seldom very technical. PageMill and SiteMill are designed to allow these people to focus on their goals and avoid the messy details.

Ceneca is financed by its founders, who would like to grow the company independently, if possible, though their growth goals may require outside capital. So far, the staff numbers only 13, none of whom is drawing a salary. The company wants to take advantage of the Web's dynamics. It plans to ask users for their most-desired features and even have them vote on which features to implement first.