Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / June 2008

Did you check out RapidWeaver?  When I helped a colleague setup her web
site some years ago with Homepage, it looked like an amateur set it up.  
I took those same pages and redid them in iWeb and Rapidweaver.  The
iWeb pages displayed poorly on Windows Internet Explorer 6 and rather
slowly.  The Rapidweaver pages were fast and clean on IE6.  And you do
care that your site looks good to everyone, right?  Not just Macintosh
users?

If you're doing this for a non-profit and it's only got three pages,
you're not gaining much by selecting iWeb over RapidWeaver ("Oh look
George.  This non-profit uses Macintoshes.").  To get the full features
of iWeb, you realize you must host the site on .Mac, right?  Certain
features like the page-counter and mail contact forms used to require
.Mac to work.  And open-source php scripts to run any sort of input form
don't work on .Mac.  If this isn't a problem or you just want to get
this task off your plate (and leave future problems for someone else),
iWeb will probably do for you.

If you want to do it _right_, you might want to look at other tools.  
Dreamweaver, as Mr. Strat so snippily posted, is the high end tool (and
costs so--$399).  There's also Freeway Express ($79) or Pro ($249).  But
these programs assume you want to lay out each page by hand or create a
template and modify each page accordingly.  It's like standing in front
of an empty canvas with paints on a pallette.  Nice if you know how to
paint.

RapidWeaver is $59 (be sure to get the Tiger version--3.6).  It works by
allowing you to create pages within a site of various types -- styled
text, a blog, a Photo gallery, a Movie page, contact form (reduces
spam), or HTML.  Then you apply one of the pre-defined site templates to
your site and it's automatically formatted.   You can change site-wide
elements like subtitle or footer info from one place without editing
multiple pages.  Additional pages to do block and multi-column layouts,
a photo collage, e-commerce, and even a simple code-managment system
(CMS) are also available from 3rd-parties.  Additional themes are also
available from RealMac and 3rd-parties.  When you're done with your
site, you publish it locally to folder or to your web server by entering
the server information (it handles regular ftp and secure sftp
transfers).

iWeb requires you to create each page using a specific style defined by
Apple's iWeb team.  Each page is created and layed-out in a MacDraw-like
manner.  When you're done creating all your pages, you publish the site
to .Mac or a folder, which requires you to ftp the files to the web
server with a separate ftp program.  iWeb out of the box handles 1 site
at a time but with an extention can handle multiple sites:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31966
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/29679

If you want to change something on multiple pages, like a subtitle, you
edit each page.

Sandvox is where RapidWeaver was a couple years ago.  When I looked at
it last year, it crashed a lot and didn't seem to have the features that
were currently available in Rapidweaver.  It had a few new things that
Rapidweaver incorporated into their latest release (ain't competition a
great thing?), but it's still to early to tell if it's worth the extra
money ($79 for their pro version which is the equivalent to RapidWeaver
right out of the box).  I also don't see the developer community as
active as the Rapidweaver community.

For a while, Goldfish
(http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/28748) languished and
seemed like it wasn't going anywhere.  It's $39.90 with lots themes but
no extensions.  Seems rather light-weight to me in my short look at it.

If this is way more than you want to invest in creating your web site,
you should just upgrade to 10.4.11, use iWeb, and forget it.  Otherwise,
do a little research and you'll save yourself grief when the non-profit
comes back and asks for more stuff.  It will just get harder and harder
to do in iWeb.  Not a problem if this is just a one-off.  But that's
your call...

Good luck.

Well, Leopard _is_ more unstable than Tiger. I've had more KPs with Leopard
since I installed it last year (one) than I ever had with Tiger. There. See.
It's obviously unusable.

Of course, this makes it just as unstable as Panther, and more stable than
Jaguar (one and two KPs, respectively) and _far_ more stable than earlier
versions (three KPs...) so I think that I'll keep it anyway.

I must've missed that... *confused* Where did he say that?