Macs have always had pro level design programs. But the average consumer pretty much had to rely on plain old HTML to create web pages. Fortunately, that’s no longer the case.

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-

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Casual User, Software Review, WYSIWYG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.