Karelia Software publishers of the lamented Watson program that preceded the current version of Apple’s Sherlock, and which it looks like Apple, ah, borrowed from, has a new Web design program, Sandvox.

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.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 17th, 2006 at 1:07 pm 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.