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JayTelford Author

Level 1

2 points

Good web design software to replace iWeb

Hello There,

I have been using iWeb for a while now, and despite its limitations, I like it. Now that Apple has discontinued (or will discontinue) MobileMe and some of the features wont be available any more, I decided to move to another web-design program.

I have downloaded the trial of rapidweaver (the one with the 3 page limit) so I could play with it and see what it was like. It is HORRIBLE, it is not easy to use, importing pictures seems pretty impossible. I cant insert pictures like I can in iWeb, I cant drag things around like I can in iWeb - the whole program seems to be template and text based.

I don't really know how to do coding or anything, so I am not looking for a fancy web-design tool that costs a fortune. But I want something that I can actually use. I want to do the following;

Create pages from scratch if I want to
Insert images and reposition them
Insert images into my text and aline them
Have a blog
Have a photo gallery
insert movies (when I want to share them)
have a chat room
Have a nice looking site without having to do any serious heavy coding (because I don't really know how to)

Can someone please suggest to me a good website design program that is comparable to iWeb and with which I can replace the afore mentioned iWeb. Eervyone says RapidWeaver, but I really didnt like it.

Posted on Mar 18, 2012 12:51 PM

20 replies

Roddy

Level 6

17,265 points

Aug 28, 2012 11:32 AM in response to JayTelford

In web design the "template" is provided by the basic HTML plus some layout info from the stylesheet. The "theme" is created with CSS.

The advantage to using a master stylesheet is that the browser only has to load it once for the whole site. As soom as you start using drag and drop, a whole bunch of positioning info and other styles are added to the HTML file. This is one of the main factors in slow downloading web pages.

Column layouts are used a lot since the objects position themselves automatically in relation to their position in the HTML.

Dreamweaver may be the "industry standard" but it certainly doesn't make your website "future proof"! Its the way in which you design the site that does that.

Applications that add all the <!--[if lte IE 6 etc]> automatically are writing a lot of stuff that is not necessary and a lot of them seem to reference non-essential javascript in the doc head which is deemed bad practice nowadays.

As I have pointed out before, there are 100's of free stylesheets (themes?) available and you can get a really good editor for free. Why would someone who spent $15 on iWeb want to pay more than twice that just for a theme?

Now that we are all having to design for mobile devices, less is definitely more and there's no such thing as "future proof". Even the HTML5 Boilerplate doesn't claim to be so and is constantly being updated and criticized.

HTML has become a lot simpler now that table layouts are not used (except for tables of course) and HTML styling info is for the dinosaurs amongst us. It doesn't take much to learn the basics.

You would need to be fairly serious about web design to spend $100 plus on one app. Anybody who has pretensions of being a web designer needs to know, at least, the fundemantals of CSS - even if its just to be able to alter a pre-existing stylesheet and avoid all these unnecessary inline styles.

The more we learn - the less we know!

JayTelford Author

Level 1

2 points

Aug 28, 2012 12:20 PM in response to Roddy

Hey again Roddy

I agree that it's the way you design, not the program that you design with, which future proofs your website. However in order to do "future proof designing" you need a program which is capable of doing so.

A basic drag and drop program can't do this, at least not in my view. You need something that is going to allow you to start at the very basic and advance as you learn, or as standards and technology changes.

There are still many businesses and corporations out there using IE6 as their default browsers, so writing off IE6 detection isn't really a valid option either. At the very least you want a basic text page to show saying "you need to upgrade your browser to IE7 or later", and giving a link to the relivent Microsoft site.

Of course it's best practice just to code your site so it alters layouts and colours and text styles to be comparable with IE6 if that browser is detected.

The most important thing in modern web-design is designing for a mobile browser on smartphones and tablets. In the past I would have said you need to have a mobile specific site such as, m.domainname.com. However, in today's world, I think it's far more important and much more professional, to simply have a responsive design, that changes from navigation bar to menu and resizes the text, graphics and page, when a mobile device is detected.

Again simple drag and drop program's are not able to fully implement responsive designs (although rapidweaver does a good job with some of its responsive themes) the downfall of this, is that you are back to paying out $35/$40 for the privilege.

Several months ago, when I was looking to move from iWeb, due to the discontinuation of MobileMe, I was in the position of feeling quite desperate because I didn't know any coding. I didn't know how to write HTML and was almost in tears when it came to implementing CSS. I stuck with it however, went to an evening class in website design and bought books and learning resources to work through at home.

Now I can use dreamweaver with relative competence, and although I wouldn't say I'm professional (I still need my books sometimes) I can write HTML and deploy CSS with confidence and am now moving onto designing a more complex website that includes multiple subdomains an e-commerce solution and php linking a MySLQ database for members access.

It's not always best to just think small. Where it's important to know and accept your current limitations, in my view, the second important thing in modern web-design, besides ugh, design, (whether you are a seasoned pro, or starting right at the beginning) is to give yourself plenty of room for growth and expansion and not to cobble yourself with something that's going to be too basic and cost you more money in the long run.

Rapidweaver, would give plenty of scope for learning growth and expanding ideas. I have used it and it's an excellent program as an intermediary. Like I said though, I've now moved on to more advanced design nd have adopted dreamweaver, which I get as part of the adobe creative cloud.

I don't have any links to either company other than I'm a happy user. That is the sole bases for my suggestions

Roddy

Level 6

17,265 points

Aug 28, 2012 1:37 PM in response to JayTelford

I am more likely to use a responsive design for most users and provide a dumbed down one for geriatrics using anything less than IE 9.

What most people forget to do for for corporate IE users is add a noscript...

<div class="noscript">Please enable JavaScript to view this page properly. </div>

</noscript>

IT techs are ntorious for turning of JS in IE to speed it up.

jQuery mobile gives you all you need to create responsive designs and its not exactly rocket science...

http://mobile.ezmacwebdesign.com/

Every now and again I try to create a responsive design with less code. Compare the amount of code in the HTML of this page with one created in RapidWeaver.

JayTelford Author

Level 1

2 points

Aug 28, 2012 11:42 PM in response to Roddy

Hi,

It's interesting to see how you have deployed those with minimal code. I would probably have had much more code than that. But that is probably because I'm still following industry best practices and coding for every contingency.

It's interesting to see how you can use responsive designs in the way you have. My designs check what the browser reports itself as being (which tells it what device it is being viewed on) and then make the relivent changes to the site layout. Changing the "navigation bar" for a "menu" and ressizing the size of text and graphics and then reorder the pages accordingly.

All this however, increases loading time, so I am interested in the way you have deployed a responsive design with minimal code and I think I might go back to a few of my own designs that I discarded due to very slow load times and apply your thinking to them.

Maybe I can get them workable.

Although I don't sell any of my stuff (as of yet) I am working on building myself a business site (as I said in my last post) with the intention of starting to sell. So loading time and userbility has become very important to me.

Roddy

Level 6

17,265 points

Aug 29, 2012 9:12 AM in response to JayTelford

Larger, more complex, sites usually have different versions of the site and load the appropriate one using some form of browser sniffing which creates its own problems and is best avoided IMHO.

Responsive designs can cover all devices but their success requires some planning. One of the main decisions required for mobile phone designs is what can be left out!

The problem with using templates is that the designer has to put in everything they think may be required - whether its needed or not. You only have to look at the source of a Wordpress design to see this.

I had a look at the source of Roger's RapidWeaver page and it references 26 stylesheets and none of them are minimised (optimized).

With your own designs you can decide which styles to load for each page. If you have a separate stylesheet for the contact form you can load it on just the Contact page and so on.

Surfers can be very impatient and your landing page has to load fast. There's no use saying that your landing page downloads OK on a computer with high speed internet when its aimed at those using smart phones on a wireless network. Most smart phone plans have data limits and users don't want to have to download all the usual junk that appears on regular sites.

Using @media rules you can spare smart phone users the pain of swiping through all this junk and load lower res versions of images and, in particular, movies.

Movies are the big challenge. Its easy to make the HTML5 video tag responsive and to do the same with Vimeo/YouTube using the fitVids.js. The problem is that the movie file will either refuse to load or take forever on a smart phone.

Video-JS is a reliable way to get movies to play using HTML5 with flash fallback for older browsers and Firefox. Its not so easy to get it to behave reponsively in both HTML5 and flash.

My method is to have three different versions of the video file - and the poster images of course - and load the appropriate one using @media. Some ifs are required for Firefox and IE but it does work and each device can get an appropriate version.

When using any method to add video to a website its really important to prevent it preloading.

Good web design software to replace iWeb