Web site creation tools fall into two rough categories with a fair amount of overlap. Template based editors are generally the best option for the small site webmaster as they use pre-built designs that allow for almost instant content creation and publishing. WSYIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors allow you to design and position all the page elements. Those offer more flexibility coupled with more work and need for design skill.

Template Based Editors

Template based editors offer the casual or time-strapped webmaster a shortcut for creating web sites. Templates or themes are pre-designed, sidestepping the complex design phase freeing you to simply input your content and click to publish or update a site.

iWeb

Since Apple publishes iWeb it is going to get a lot of press. The main selling point of iWeb is that it lets Apple, or third party, designers provide attractive templates, freeing the end user to add content easily. Design is done by designers and we can create web sites with a minimum of learning and fuss. iWeb is intended to work seamlessly with Apples iApps, which it does. Within this narrow range of expectations, iWeb does what it is supposed to.

iWeb created sites are attractive. Unfortunately, they have some characteristics that make them less than desirable for business use. The main downside to iWeb created sites is that the file sizes of iWeb created web pages are simply too big to download quickly on any but the very fastest internet connections. That fact alone makes iWeb unsuitable for anything but personal web pages.

Other shortcomings include an inability to add raw HTML to a web page. Insulating the average user from coding is an admirable goal but makes it impossible to add third party services like PayPay shopping buttons or YouTube videos. Also, an inability to use semantic page elements hurts search engine friendliness.

Cost: Included with new Mac purchases. Part of the iLife Suite

Bottom Line: iWeb is easy to use and creates attractive web sites. It is fine for personal pages that friends and family are willing to wait for.

Sandvox

Karelia Software’s Sandvox shares much of the ease-of-use of iWeb and manages to address most of its shortcomings. Like iWeb, Sandvox offers professionally designed templates on which the end user can create full websites. Also as with iWeb we are given real time views of what the final site will look like as we are working.

But Sandvox goes a bit farther. Pages can be constructed with Pageltes, building blocks of content that can be added via drag and drop. While iWeb offers easy publishing to .Mac and a more complicated export to other web servers, Sandvox will publish directly to any web server with on click. (prior setup is necessary).

Like iWeb, Sandvox makes inclusion of photos or media files a simple drag and drop affair, as well as offering basic blog features. Also like iWeb Sandvox also offers pre-built design templates. Unlike iWeb, these are not designed by Apple designers and are not quite as polished, though there are more choices. But since Sandvox does not allow any live page design editing the resulting files are of very reasonable size and download speed.

The pro version of Sandvox also allows for raw HTML inclusion, as well as PHP and JavaScript for enhanced functionality. Your web server does have to offer PHP for you to take advantage of this feature. The advanced version also allows for adding HTML tags to the head section of a web page, which helps with search engine friendliness.

Cost: $49 Standard Version – $79 Pro Version

Bottom Line: Sandvox addresses most of iWeb’s shortcomings, though it costs noticeably more. Some of the included templates are acceptable for small business use. Some are quite fun for personal sites. Though none are quite as polished as iWeb’s templates, they are better than anything a non-designer could create.

RapidWeaver

RapidWeaver is a somewhat different animal from Sandvox and iWeb. At version 3.5 it is much more mature and feature rich. But unlike the other two programs it does not offer a real-time preview of you web pages as you work. Editing is done in a word processing like window and you need to click a preview button to see what the finished product will look like. While I don’t consider that a drawback, some do. I believe that separating content creation from design actually frees people from distraction.

RapidWeaver is also a bit more complicated to learn than the other programs, but not terribly so. Basic functionality is easy to grasp without reading the (very good) documentation. Some more advanced editing features, like text wrap around images, require a small bit of digging to uncover.

Like iWeb and Sandvox, RapidWeaver plays well with iPhoto and iTunes, making it straightforward to drag and drop content onto a web page. And also like iWeb and Sandvox, blog publishing, including podcasting is fast and easy to accomplish. The same is true of web photo albums.

Since the program has been around for a couple of years, independent theme designers have had plenty of time to create new page designs. There are easliy over a hundred available at this time and new ones coming out regularly. These themes are sold independently of RapidWeaver but are very inexpensive, running from around $5-$20. Some are very attractive. Most are competent and suitable for a wide range of sites.

RapidWeaver is a rich program and has a number of other features like live PHP rendering and the ability to easily mix HTML directly into a page. It also has a plug-in acrhitecture that lets third party developers create add-ons like Blocks, a free-form editing tool.

Cost: $39.95

Bottom Line: RapidWeaver is a very capable web site creation program, fully suitable for the small business owner who wants to be able to build a professional site without learning learning web design.

Goldfish

Another template based web site creation program is Goldfish, which also allows for some actual page design customizing.

Goldfish gets around iWeb’s large file size by limiting the background image editing functionality and produces web pages of reasonable download size. But the downside of this is that most of the templates available for the program are very basic. Depending on the design skills you bring to the project, that is either a plus or a minus. Goldfish is not just a template based site creation tool but a web page layout program, albeit a very basic one.

Ease of use is excellent. As with all of these programs, integration with Apple’s system is straightforward. Code inclusion is also available for easy inclusion of third party web content and services.

Cost: $34.95

Bottom Line: If page layout control appeals to you more than pre-built professional designs, Goldfish is worth a look. It has enough functionality for a range of sites and allows more design flexibility than RapidWeaver or Sandvox, though fewer other features.

WYSIWYG Editors (what you see is what you get)

WYSIWYG editors leave you free to build your own site your own way and take care of the coding part for you behind the scenes. They’re what the average person thinks of first for web site creation. They allow for more freedom of creative design expression than the template based programs but leave you to take care of more of the details like internal links and image resizing.

Seamonkey

[Seamonkey](http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/_ is the direct descendent, and most current version, of the Netscape and Mozilla suites of web applications. Seamonkey contains a module for web site editing and creation, called Composer. According to the Seamonkey page:

SeaMonkey’s powerful yet simple HTML editor keeps getting better with dynamic image and table resizing, quick insert and delete of table cells, improved CSS support, and support for positioned layers. For all your documents and website projects, Composer is all you need.

It may not be all you need for a large or complex site but Seamonkey Composer is more than adequate for the typical business brochure or personal website. It provides a competent WYSIWYG editor and support for direct code and CSS editing.

Where Composer shines is in updating existing web pages. Navigate to the site in the web browser component, Navigator, select Edit Page from the File menu and the page opens up in full editing mode. If you have the site login information entered in Seamonkey, simply edit the page and click the Publish button for instant gratification.

The editing environment has the full range of text editing capabilities as well as easy image inclusion, and table and link creation.

Cost: Free

Bottom Line: Seamonkey Composer is an excellent tool for updating web sites and an competent tool for building sites from scratch, though its cousin NVU is better suited to that task.

Nvu

Nvu is another offshoot of the old Netscape Composer component. Nvu is a stand-alone program with versions for Mac, Windows and Linux. Created by the Linspire people. The site claims that Nvu is “A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.”

That’s hyperbole. Nvu is a very nice WYSIWYG web editing program, though it comes nowhere close to Dreamweaver or Frontpage in capability or polish. It does have an perfectly capable set of features for the one-site webmaster. It is also easier to use than Dreamweaver. The cost of extra features is extra complexity and a steeper learning curve. From the Nvu site:

WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.

Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.

Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today’s most popular browsers.

Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.

Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.

Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.

Cost: Free

Bottom Line: For the non-professional web designer or webmaster, Nvu offers a competent editor at an unbeatable price. While it doesn’t require any knowledge of HTML or web coding to operate, a little knowledge would help you make a better site, but that’s true of most web design programs.

Freeway

Freeway is actually two program, Express and Pro, but the Freeway website presents them as one with different versions so that’s how I’ll address them here. Softpress claims that “Freeway 4.2 is a Universal Application developed to be the fastest, easiest, most powerful way to design and build new websites.” That’s close to true if, by that, they mean build from scratch, though, Nvu claims the same thing. Compared to the template based web site creation programs it is quite complicated to learn.

Freeway is a designer’s tool, that completely insulates the end user from code. It works very much the same way as a page layout program like InDesign or Xpress and should be pretty easy for people comfortable with those programs to transfer their skills to. If you have good graphic design skills, Freeway will let you exercise them fully.

An advantage that Freeway offers over most web programs is that it has quite capable image editing features built in, especially for graphically displayed text. These features may save you the need to use an external image editing program.

Freeway gives very exacting layout control through either table based layout or absolutely positioned divs. That may give the print designer transferring her skills to the web a warm fuzzy feeling, but makes for somewhat brittle page layouts. Things look great until the end user decides to make the text larger (or smaller), or turns off images for increased download speed. Absolutely sized and positioned page elements are great if the visitor leaves the page the way you designed it, but don’t look so nice if the text they are containing is resized. Freeway Pro does offer the ability to specify relative element sizes, which to some extent offsets this problem.

Freeway Express gives users the layout features to create web sites. Freeway Pro offers a more special text effect options as well as a more flexible workspace and CSS layout capability and output options.

Cost: Freeway Express $99 – Freeway Pro $279

Bottom Line: For years, Freeway offered the only option between hand coding and professional level and cost web design programs. It still occupies that niche but has some solid competition from the template based programs. If you are a graphic designer who wants to build an occasional website, or want to really design, not just build your site, Freeway is an excellent option.

Dreamweaver

Survey a large group of web designers and chances are 80% of them use Dreamweaver for at least part of their work. Dreamweaver is the industry standard.

Does that mean you should go out and get a copy if you want to build a website? Only if you want to become a pro web designer. Dreamweaver is a large, capable and feature rich program that really rewards the designer/developer who knows the field.

Dreamweaver does offer a WYSIWYG design mode that is excellent. It is quite possible for someone with little or no HTML knowledge to use Dreamweaver. But the cost and the learning time involved in getting up to speed with Dreamweaver make every other option described so far more appealing.

Where Dreamweaver shines is as a production tool for large sites or for integrating dynamic content into a website. It has good site management capabilities and very good integration with two other web design standards, Flash and Fireworks. The list of features goes on and on.

Want to use PHP, SQL, XML, CSS, JavaScript, Cold Fusion? Dreamweaver is the ticket. Don’t even know what those terms mean? Dreamweaver is overkill.

Cost: $399

Bottom Line: If you are a professional web designer chances are that you already use Dreamweaver or are a hardcore hand coder. If you are a single site webmaster, consider other options.

Contribute

Adobe’s Contribute is really not a website creation tool but an maintenance one. It is excellent for updating or adding to sites created with Dreamweaver. Like Seamonkey’s Composer, it allows you to browse to a web page and edit it in a simple but capable editor. But it won’t let you touch the design elements of a page, just the content.

If you are maintaining your own site, Composer is free and quite capable. If you are working on a company or organization site, Contribute offers some distinct advantages, like version control, locked page elements and backups.

Cost: $149

Bottom Line: If you hire a designer to create your website but want to maintain it yourself, Contribute will allow you to do so without the steep learning overhead of Dreamweaver.

GoLive

Before Adobe bought Dreamweaver and its parent company, GoLive was its only real competitor. Now with two industrial strength web design programs in Adobe’s stable, GoLive’s future is uncertain. That’s a shame.

GoLive is every bit as capable as Dreamweaver. Some things, such as integrating with other Adobe programs like Photoshop and InDesign it does brilliantly. GoLive also has the best site management features in the industry.

As a web development platform for dynamic sites, Dreamweaver excels. But for static website creation and maintenance, it’s pretty much a tossup. I have used both and whenever I switch, I always miss a feature in one that the other offers.

GoLive offers the same benefits and downsides as Dreamweaver. It is a big and complex program that offers capabilities that the occasional web designer will not even know are there or how to use.

A number of people have GoLive as part of the Adobe Creative Suite. If you are one of those people, it might be worth using GoLive. You already own it. Or, if you are a graphic designer who uses InDesign, the tight integration between the programs would make GoLive an obvious fit.

Cost: $400

Bottom Line: GoLive is equivalent to Dreamweaver in most web design functions and offers some unique benefits. With its future uncertain, I wouldn’t recommend buying a new copy. If you already own it, don’t switch to Dreamweaver unless you want to develop database served content.

Sandvox is aimed at pretty much the same target market as iWeb, though this time it appears that Apple’s development was really independent of Karelia’s. But iWeb comes bundled with iLife and new Macs while Sandvox costs $40. The question is whether or not Sandvox offers enough for the money to build a viable market.

From a web designer’s standpoint, this is a much, much better program. It builds sites with clean code and attractive designs. Unlike iWeb it doesn’t try to make web design emulate standard page layout. That may seem restrictive to the uninitiated but it does mean that the pages created by Sandvox are markedly better as web pages. Besides the cleaner and semantically correct code, which the average person won’t care about, it makes lean, fast loading pages. There are no background images that consume hundreds of kilobytes of bandwidth. Put simply, web sites created by Sandvox actually work for the average visitor and won’t choke lower speed internet connections.

Sandvox comes with a number of attractive templates that range from professional to fanciful. And, unlike iWeb, new templates are reasonably easy for an experienced designer to create. I could see creating a site for a client and giving them a copy of Sandvox to maintain it.

Sandvox offers some nice features like photo albums, RSS, site upload, podcasting/video, embedded pages, site maps and connections to external services like digg. These can be created in new pages or added as subsections of existing pages. Click to insert and your pages are expanded. It also has drag and drop from either the finder or a media browser. This is an easy program to use.

Like iWeb, Sandvox builds web pages without tables. But it does allow much less customization of the final web site. Text formatting is defined by the style sheets. Period. Text cannot be resized within a section, nor can it be colored or have its alignment altered. As a designer, I can appreciate the strict control over the output. I wonder, though, if this is going to seem too restrictive to many end users. I love lists and wouldn’t but a program that excluded them from my formatting options.

I would like to see right or centered text justification built in along with the ability to include headers, lists and blockquotes. It’s great to enforce a set style on a site but these are common formatting or page elements, that simply need to be available.

Well, they are, sort of. The “Pro” version of Sandvox allows access to a page’s HTML and a style-less view. Karelia mentions other “advanced” features for the Pro version but I can’t find them. But we have quickly left the easy-to-use realm and added $40 to the programs price for the privilage.

Sandvox will create attractive web sites, easily and with a short learning curve. It has a full compliment of multimedia features and site extras. However, its inexplicable lack of basic formatting options goes too far in the directon of style control.

In competition with the (basically) free iWeb and the more mature and feature rich RapidWeaver, Sandvox may have a problem gaining acceptance. That would be a shame. With just a bit more in the way of formatting features it could be an excellent web design program for many people.

Publisher: Karelia Software
Mac OS X 10.4 required, Universal Binary.

Ease of use: 5
Features: 3
Value: 3
Documentation: 3

It may or may not be a good fit.

Apple’s iWeb has gotten a lot of press lately, which is no surprise considering the incredible promotion machine that runs in Cupertino. But there are other options for the do-it-yourselfer. RealMac’s excellent RapidWeaver is a mature and capable offering. Karelia Software’s Sandvox, still in beta, looks promising.

But these are not design programs. They all work from pre-built templates. You select a design, then add your content. Now, in most cases this is a good thing. You can let professional designers do the design and you can concentrate on adding your own content.

But if you really want to design your site, you are pretty limited. You can change your site name and possibly logo but to do more you have to directly edit the templates, throwing you back into hand coding. Where’s the advantage in that?

If you want an easy-to-use and inexpensive web design program, look no further than Goldfish. Goldfish is a layout program that converts your designs into a complete website, ready to upload to your webserver.

If you have ever used any page layout program, from the Drawing module in Appleworks to InDesign, you should feel right at home. Every page element is a box that you drag onto the page, position and resize. A page element palette offers you options like images, text, list, headlines, photo gallery, and movies. Click a button and drag the element onto your page. Resize the box and you are ready to edit the content. A contextual palette lets you adjust the content and even the padding and margins of each page element box. It is simple and works well.

You don’t edit the page directly, but use editing windows for each element. That threw me until I figured it out, but it is simple and functional.

Drag photos onto the page from either a Finder window or from iPhoto and resize to fit. Goldfish takes care of JPEG compression for you. You can add a Quicktime movie the same way, though that should be saved in a web ready format first. If you want a photo gallery, place a gallery element on the page, select an image source folder in the contextual palette, and Goldfish creates both the thumbnail page and a large image display page with previous and next arrows. Easy. When you are done, click Publish in the File menu and you have a complete website.

Pages are all laid out using CSS and absolutely positioned divs for each page element. The code is pretty clean and lean for an automated page conversion program. All page elements are fixed width in pixels. It is not possible to specify percentage widths or heights. The pages have both the advantages and disadvantages inherent in absolutely positioned divs. Page elements will show up exactly where you want them but if your visitor changes the font size in his browser, things might look weird.

There are a couple of other things to keep in mind when creating sites with Goldfish. When you choose fonts from the Font menu, Goldfish gives you access to all the fonts on your computer. Most people who will be attracted to this program won’t know that web page display is dependent on the fonts the viewer has installed on her computer. So, that cool headline you create in Broadway will show up as Times New Roman on the other end. I understand that people will feel constricted if they are limited to web safe fonts but is that worse than giving a wider choice in design that will be unpredictable in a visitor’s display?

On a consumer level web design program, I’d like to see built in FTP functionality, so people could publish directly to their website or .Mac space. It’s a small thing, and there are decent free FTP programs, but file transfer is something that often confuses people.

Goldfish will create page menus for you. Just hope that you like one of the two included designs.

An iPhoto browser built into Goldfish would be another nice touch, though the existing drag and drop functionality works just fine.

All of these are really minor quibbles. Goldfish works and makes it easy to do your own web design. If you absolutely have to do your page design yourself you have Goldfish or the more expensive and complicated Freeway Express, which does give more control and features. They both insulate you from HTML. They both have 30 free demos.

Publisher Fishbeam Software
Goldfish $34.90
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.1 or higher

Ease of Use: 4
Features: 3
Value: 4
Documentation: 3-

Recommended

Softpress, the publisher of Freeway wants you to: “Quickly assemble exactly the site you want to see—without any need for hand coding.” And Freeway does insulate the design from the code. For an old hand coding freak like me, that is actually a bit uncomfortable. You see, Freeway does not build HTML pages. It creates Freeway pages that you can export to complete sites. Freeway reminds me a lot of a page layout program like Quark or InDesign and somewhat of a vector design program like Adobe Illustrator.

If you are happy working with any of the programs I just mentioned you will be comfortable with Freeway. If you want complete control of your code you won’t be. It’s that cut and dried. This is truly and fully a design application, unlike Dreamweaver, which is both a layout and a coding program.

As with Illustrator, you don’t first figure out tables or CSS div structure, you draw text or image boxes on the page then insert content. GoLive and Dreamweaver can do this too, but their direct layout tools seem very primitive compared to Freeway’s. You can even link text boxes to have text flow on as you might in InDesign. As you aren’t really working on a live web page, Freeway will take your designs and export them to HTML when you are done. This gives a designer a very different sense of what is possible than what we are used to in our traditional box oriented designs.

Inserting Flash or Quicktime is easy, Freeway takes care of the coding for you. As with Dreamweaver or GoLive, Freeway comes with a number of “actions” that make adding JavaScript events to your page easy. There are the expected rollover effects and form validation actions. Freeway also includes or makes it easy to work with PHP actions, too, for adding dynamic elements to your pages.

Actions aside, this is a designer’s tool, not one for coders. If you get excited by semantic markup, you will want to pass. It takes a commercial third party action to really get control of CSS and HTML.

The $99 version, Freeway Express has the core layout functionality but not the ability to add more actions to the program. What you get is what you get. The $249 Pro version is expandable and has enough features to warrant the increase in price. That puts it in the range of Microsoft Frontpage, though it is a different animal entirely.

I’m wondering who the audience for this program is other than print designers who want to knock out the occasional web site. Since it doesn’t optimize pages well for search engines, I can’t consider it a pro web design application. For the average small business, I would recommend using a content management system or even a blog. For the casual user, iWeb and RapidWeaver give a lot of the functionality of Freeway Express for a lot less money.

I suppose that if you have aspirations to design your site, not just run it, but actually design it, Freeway is a good choice. My web design snobbery will come out here as I say that most self designed sites look less than great. Still, if you really want to do it yourself Freeway is a well made program.

It incorporates some of the image handling functions that you would normally need a dedicated image edition program for. Freeway will let you drag and drop from iPhoto, iTunes, even Word. It will handle your file uploads. And it may give you a sense of satisfaction from creating your own website.

On the down side, Freeway is not good at editing existing sites. It is not a HTML editor. So your existing pages will have to be re-created in Freeway before you can work on them. Freeway makes it easy to create text that will expand out of its place if your visitor increases the font size. That text flow from box to box loses its flow when your pages are exported to HTML and text just fits. If the font size is enlarged as many of us boomers are tending to do when we don’t want to reach for our reading glasses, your pages can look real ugly, real fast. Use that feature with caution.

If you want to create your own web sites and don’t want to learn web design and don’t expect your pages to be search engine optimized, Freeway is a solid, stable and well thought out program. It really is good at what is is designed to do. My sense is that it is attending to last years needs for design heavy sites not next years needs for semantically correct, search engine friendly sites. It’s by far easier to use than Dreamweaver or GoLive but more work than keeping up a CMS or blog. You’ll have to decide if it is Baby Bear, just right, or off the mark by being neither fish nor foul.

publisher Softpress
Freeway Express $99
Freeway Pro $249
30 day free trial. You’ll have to try this one yourself to make a decision on its value.

There is a solid, free WSYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web page editor that might just be what the doctor ordered. NVU (pronounced N-view for new view) it the stepchild of the venerable Netscape Composer module. Composer is alive an well in the Mozilla project’s SeaMonkey suite, but that’s another article.

Linspire, a Linux distribution, spearheaded the drive to make the composer module into a stand-alone application and hired Daniel Glazman, formerly the chief architect for Mozilla Composer to run that project. NVU is the result. NVU’s website claims:

A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

While you might have to be on drugs to believe that NVU compares feature-to-feature to Dreamweaver, or even FrontPage, it is still a perfectly usable program. For the non-professional it could very well be just right.

NVU takes the basic Mozilla/Netscape Composer functionality to a new level by adding integrated web site management, better form and table support, and better browser compatibility. It is also capable of producing reasonably clean, web standards compliant code. I particularly like NVU’s ability to accurately display pages laid out with CSS, something that Dreamweaver has only achieved in version 8 and FrontPage still doesn’t do well.

When I was teaching web design I liked to use NVU for a couple of reasons. The free part always appeals to people as does the fact that the program is fully cross-platform capable. Mac, Windows, even Linux versions are identical in function and as similar in looks as possible. And NVU is an excellent teaching tool.

Another feature of Composer that NVU inherited was that it was designed by and for people who understand web design. Yes, it’s now marketed to beginners but it doesn’t have the workflow sophistication of Dreamweaver. Practically, that means that it is a bit slower to use. However it does reward a bit of web page design knowledge. The more you know about HTML the easier the program is to use. Think about that from a teacher’s perspective and it is easy to understand why I liked to teach web design with it.

But NVU is perfectly usable as a design tool for the HTML ignorant. You can build pages without ever looking at the underlying code. You can add, even resize photos, edit text and position elements on the page all in WYSIWYG mode. Or you can work in a couple other editing modes, including straight HTML.

For someone who wants to put up a small to medium sized website and doesn’t need the built in dynamic scripting or templating capabilities of Dreamweaver, NVU is perfectly capable. Give it a try. It’s free.

NVU, published by NVU.com
Free

Value for money: 5
Documentation: 2
Features: 3
Ease of use: 3+

Recommended

Let’s face it, most amateur websites look amateur. Graphic design is a real skill that takes a while to learn. Web design is a hugely complex field that even pros have trouble keeping up with. Your chances of designing an attractive, functional site on your own, without a lot or study and practice are slim. That is, unless you use RapidWeaver or a good content management system (CMS) with good templates. Actually, RapidWeaver is a simple light weight CMS. It just happens to live on your own computer rather than your web server. It is not a web design program, as you utilize pre-made designs in the form of templates.

RapidWeaver is what iWeb tries to be. RapidWeaver is simple and intuitive but also reasonably powerful. Currently it is the best choice for the average person who wants to publish a good website on her own. It’s a viable option for individuals, small business owners, clubs or non-profits who want control of their own websites.

Unlike iWeb, RapidWeaver does not quite show you what your page will look like on the Web. What you see is certainly good enough for practical purposes. Style sheets are applied when the site is published and take care of your actual page look. It works.

Designs are theme based. The included themes all look pretty good and there are a number of independent design firms making additional themes at very reasonable prices. Add in plugins like RapidFlickr that connects with Flickr and MapIt that make it easy to include a Google Map on your page and you have the foundation for a terrific website.

RapidWeaver, unlike iWeb creates pages that download quickly. And, like iWeb, it creates code that is Web standards compliant. Did I mention that it’s quick and easy to use?

RapidWeaver creates ordinary web pages, photo galleries with cool Flash slideshows and iPhoto integration, as well as blog pages. It automatically creates site links for each page on every page. It makes it easy to include podcasts of audio or movies. If you know HTML and CSS you can create your own, or edit existing themes.

In theory RapidWeaver will upload your site to your webserver automatically whenever you make an update. I wasn’t able to make that work. The server connection kept timing out before anything happened. I don’t know if I didn’t set the file transfer up properly or RapidWeaver is incompatible with my server or has a bug. I found that a minor complaint though. As my ftp program has drag and drop upload capability it only takes one more simple step to publish a site.

Another problem with RapidWeaver is the contact form feature isn’t secure. It makes it easy for you to get form spammed. I wrote a help ticket to the company but haven’t received a reply. Again, I find this a minor inconvenience as I know how to write my own form processing script. However, others might find hundreds of comment spams in their inbox really annoying.

Those two inconveniences aside, I am very impressed. RapidWeaver is still excellent software that gets regular updates. iWork look promising but has some problems and isn’t anywhere near as feature rich. Until or unless Apple makes some upgrades, RapidWeaver has no competition on any platform.

Publisher: RealMac Software
RapidWeaver 3.2.1 • requires OS X.3.9 or newer.
List price: $34.95

Value per dollar: 5
Ease of use: 4
Reliability: 3+
Documentation: 5
Features: 5
Macness: 5

Highly recommended

Google Page Creator is a very simple online Website designer program that works in your browser. As you might expect, it is full of AJAX goodness and is very slick and easy to use. It feels more like a desktop application than the clunky set of web forms most online Website builders offer. Google provides a number of themes, each of which has a few page layout options. Did I mention that it is simple and easy to use?

It does a good job of insulating you from HTML, though you can edit the code directly if you want to. As with any WYSIWYG editor, if you make several revisions you are likely to see some strange empty lines in your pages. Those are the result of empty paragraph tags, that get left after the content they contain gets deleted. Still, the code looks pretty clean and is turned into working pages automatically by Page Creator.

Surprisingly, with all the interactivity built into the layout program, the resulting pages don’t offer any. They are plain-jane, old fashioned web pages. If you want RSS and automation, look to Google’s other babies Blogger, or Google Base. It is only a matter of time before the various service converge into a Google super web service, but for now Google Page Creator is separate.

What do you get? With minimum fuss, you get a website at yournamehere.googlepages.com. That’s standard for free services. You pay for the privilege by advertising in your URL. That’s not a bad way to test the World Wide Web waters. The current storage tops out at 100MB. Not bad at all and bound to increase as web storage becomes cheaper. The pages look like they were made with an automated page builder. You won’t get super spiffy designs but they are better than what an amateur typically can create.

How is this different from other online site builders like GeoCities? It is very basic but very easy to use and has a slick interface. Time will tell if it is a superior option or just another duck in a long row.

You do need a Gmail account before you can sign up for Page Creator. That’s free.

Ease of use: 5
Features: 2
Output: 3
Value for money: 5

Worth checking out.