iWeb, RapidWeaver, or GoLiveCS2?

Hi, I suspect GoLive would be alot harder to learn than rapidWeaver or iweb, You should look at freeway as a choice, this I feel fits inbetween easy and restrictive products such as iweb and rapidweaver and hard but complete programs such as dreamweaver and golive.

I suggest you al have a look at Freeway 4, either pro or Express. It's sort of like Indesign/Pages/Photoshop in one WYSIWYG web application. More info here:

Freeway 4

How do you use Freeway Express to post photo albums? Isn't that what Claude Thomas 1 wants to do?

Sue

If I ugrade to iLife06 from 05, I'll get iWeb,
right?

Yes.

Is RapidWeaver worth the extra money?

Not if you have already purchase iLife with iWeb.

As an academic, I can get GoLiveCS2 from
www.campustech.com for $75. This is a $399 retail
program, and Adobe says it is "easy to use". Is this
true? Will I get more than iWeb or RapidWeaver?

The "easy to use" is all relative. GoLive is not as easy as RapidWeaver or (from what I can tell from Job's keynote) iWeb. It's in fact an application largely designed for professional web designers. For those with no experience making websites, it can be difficult to use. $75 is a great price for a product like that and it is certainly considerably more powerful than iWeb and RapidWeaver; but for your purposes, it seems overkill.

There is an action to create web galleries as part of your freeway site. I'm not sure it works in Express, but it will be in the actions for download on the softpress site. Worth a try, anyway.

I don't have iWeb yet, but it looks very simple if you have a .mac account. I am using RapidWeaver, have no web site experience, and it's a dream to use. Plus, it does allow for customization if you know or learn some html. Cheap and easy by any stretch. Forget GoLive...you'll be studying and not doing what you ultimately want to do...post stuff on a web site.

km

"Is RapidWeaver worth the extra money?"

Answers will be subjective, of course. Personally, I think it is, and I've used both. I think users who begin with iWeb will eventually find it too limiting, and will look for other solutions. RapidWeaver is much more flexible, has more themes and different page styles. And if you want to use HTML, custom CSS or Javascript, you can do so in RapidWeaver.

If you want to find out more, you can download a limited demo of RapidWeaver from www.realmacsoftware.com. It's a fully functional version, but only lets you create three pages.

Tom

GoLive is a demanding program - the learning curve is rather steep and it doesn't like anything less than a fast G4 computer. And for what you want to do it is overkill. Putting up a webpage of vacation or holiday pictures can be easily done directly in iPhoto, for example, but not in GoLive. iWeb is perfect for this. My first test of the program was to recreate my vacation pages from this summer. In less than 30 minutes I had a very attractive set of pages.

I agree with others that iWeb's templates are rather limited and limiting. While I'll almost certainly choose it for 'photoblogs' I'll look to other solutions for my other needs. Sandvox looks to be a contender - a public beta (very beta) is now available. Freeway is another program you'd do well to look at.

My two cents: I created a website for a small foundation a couple months ago, and because I was able to get academic pricing on GoLive CS2 (actually the entire Creative Suite) I went ahead and snatched it up. It definitely took me about a week of reading and messing around to feel completely comfortable with the basics, but once I was I was able to put together a site with multiple pages quickly and easily.

I can tell it's directed towards more advanced users (at least if you want to use its full potential), but I was able to learn the basics pretty easily...and I don't really know html.

It's probably overkill for what you need, but the price is also pretty sweet if you think you'll move to the next level at some point. I will say though that it is designed to work with Photoshop and Illustrator, and without those you're missing out on its full capabilities. They play very well together and make things easy.

Well, I own GoLive and haven't touched it since I started using RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver is actually fun to use, and has templates being designed by top css artists all over the world. Sophisticated and imaginative style. It's simple on the surface, but has the advantage of being able to "open the hood" to modify or add things as advanced as you like, an easy learn as you go approach. iWeb looks slick, but doesn't seem as versatile, and some of its features only work for .Mac accounts. Plus, RapidWeaver has the best support forums I've ever imagined, one intensely cool and helpful group. I'll use iWeb for some unique features, but mostly to copy things into RapidWeaver...

.. but mostly to copy things into RapidWeaver...

I have Dreamweaver and I am very happy with it. I just got iWeb and tried a couple of pages. The template design is tasteful and easy to navigate. I would love to be able to copy the templates to Dreamweaver. I tried to open the index.html page, but only got the top code, no content. Do you suppose if I set up a new "site" it would load?

Where are you finding the code in iWeb? I cannot find it.

G5/ Mac OS X (10.4.4) Using Dreamweaver

As a follow up, I have now almost completely stopped using GoLive and am using iWeb almost exclusively. Mainly b/c it's so easy and quick to use. It's definitely more restrictive, but it looks nice and is easy.

Our foundation website is http://www.catalinafoundation.org

You'll notice that I used GoLive to skirt around iWeb's inability to work with Paypal (on the Donation page), but otherwise everything is through iWeb.