Mac web editing software options have been growing in the last few years. In this overview I’ll leave out text editors like BBEdit and TextMate and focus only on those that insulate the end user either fully or partially from the underlying HTML code. Understanding how to create web pages from scratch with HTML and CSS and sometimes JavaScript adds the ability to customize and expand your options. But it’s a steep price to pay if you only need to put up a small web site.

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.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 at 9:52 am and is filed under Editors, 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.