Business Catalyst Pricing

Question

Hi Adobe .. First, let me say that I L-O-V-E Business Catalyst and Muse. As a 21-year graphic design professional that was forced into learning code (yuk), Muse has set my creativity free and I now absolutely love designing web sites. I have a Creative Cloud subscription, and I like that I have five sites I can host through Business Catalyst. That's great ... BUT ...
This morning, I decided to use BC hosting for the first time (instead of GoDaddy), and was shocked that none of the sites that come with my Creative Cloud/Business Catalyst subscription includes email. NOT ONE EMAIL ADDRESS IS INCLUDED??! In order to include email in any of the five sites hosted through Business Catalyst, I have to pay an additional $12.21 a month.
Surely, Adobe is smart enought to recognize that Muse designers will want to use Business Catalyst as the hosting hub for all their clients, but Adobe is NOT smart enought to recognize that you have priced yourself out of the market entirely??? GoDaddy offers hosting for $5.99 a month, and the monthly charge has been on sale for $2.99. This GoDaddy hosting plan includes as many email addresses as you want. Why would I go with Business Catalyst and pay four times as much?
Sriously Adobe, please research your competitors pricing, and make your prices competitive!! I would love to use Muse and Business Catalyst exclusively for all my clients and hosting, but I'm not going to pay 4 times more than I need to. Why would I?

Answer 1

Hey cloudnine--
While Liam's post was generally condescending in it's tone, I think he has a valid point.  From a web professional's point of view, Muse is a great starting point for graphic designers coming to the web.  It's a great tool for a creative department to quickly generate working prototypes that are close to a professional website.
However, there's A LOT more that goes into designing and developing for the web that you need to know about for production-quality websites. Namely, advanced CSS authoring, cross-browser restraints and semantic HTML markup for the benefit of search engines.  Not to mention responsive design, image optimization, code minification and other skills required for the "mobile-first" approach which places a heavy focus on reducing network connections and bandwidth. "Mobile-first", responsive design for all screen sizes is the future.
I, too, have seen very impressive Muse sites but many of them feature 1mb, full-color, full sized PNG images all over the place-- slowing the site to a crawl. Sometimes, if people continue to use Muse and Dreamweaver's authoring techniques they miss out on the bigger picture of how to appropriately use stylesheets and write markup that search engines will eat up. 
Using Muse and Dreamweaver are great for designers who are wanting to learn to code but I too would recommend getting outside of both those programs on occasion to flex your muscles.  You can create a great website with Notepad, an FTP client and a graphics program like  Photoshop, Fireworks or even the free GIMP. 
A great tool I show people so they can play with markup and styles is http://scratchpad.io.  Peep it.
I believe there is a place for us all to coexist and some designer's code authoring levels are different.  BC and Muse are a great place for graphic designers publish websites using the Adobe authoring tools but to produce a standards-compliant, feature-rich website you'll eventually need to learn the best practices for HTML/CSS/Javascript. 
You're right how most of us web professionals have crappy websites. Mine is too but that's usually because our paying work takes precedence.
Finally, don't get discouraged on this board.  There are lots of opinions and Liam is mostly harmless.  I think he just types too fast and his head moves faster than his fingers so sometimes his grammar is off but he means well and is one of the most active forum users here for BC.
Best,
Chris