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Adobe on Monday announced that its venerable visual Web site creation tool GoLive has been discontinued. The company has ceased development and sales of GoLive effective Monday, April 28.

GoLive started life as CyberStudio, an early What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Web editor, the flagship product of German developers GoLive Systems. Adobe acquired GoLive Systems in 1999 and rechristened CyberStudio as Adobe GoLive. GoLive has gone through nine major revisions, culminating in 2007's release of GoLive 9.

In late 2005, Adobe acquired rival Macromedia and has since integrated many of Macromedia's products into its own product line, including Dreamweaver, another visual Web site development application. Since then, Adobe the line has blurred between GoLive and DreamWeaver, according to Devin Fernandez, GoLive's product manager.

"GoLive helped creative professionals to support what was then a new market trend," said Fernandez. "That is, design moving to the Web."

Now that more and more creative professionals are becoming Web professionals, their needs have increased, and Dreamweaver is a better fit, said Fernandez.

"Even after GoLive 9 came out people were drawn to Dreamweaver," Fernandez told Macworld, "especially around features and support for technology like AJAX and CSS Starter Points. Dreamweaver also supports dynamic content, while GoLive doesn't."

While Adobe is discontinuing development and sales of GoLive, the company will continue to support GoLive users with online tutorials and migration assistance created by usage experts. The company has also collaborated with online training service Lynda.com to provide tutorials for GoLive users.

Adobe is also offering a $199 upgrade for registered GoLive users to switch to Dreamweaver. More details will be posted to Adobe's Web site.