Iweb And Its Replacement (Part 3)

Alternatively, try... RapidWeaver or Freeway

Talking of Freeway and RapidWeaver, if you want to continue using a visual web pub­lishing tool and don’t want to get yourself trapped in the wreckage of iWeb, switching to either of those apps at this point would make a lot of sense. RapidWeaver 5 (real- macsoftware.com/rapidweaver) works in a similar way to iWeb, with your page design controlled by a series of templates. It comes with a generous selection of 45 templates and 11 different page types, covering photo galleries, contact forms, blogs and so on.

Freeway and RapidWeaver

All you need to do is enter your text, using a visual word processing environment, and either drag in your images or add them using the familiar OS X media panel. You don’t need to understand any code, but if you are familiar with HTML and CSS you can design your own templates for a truly unique site.

Although it’s designed with non-technical users in mind, RapidWeaver is a fully extend­able platform, with 11 plug-ins built in and many more available to download.

Freeway (softpress.com), which comes in Express and Pro editions, takes a more visual approach to web design, presenting you with an environment more akin to a fully fledged DTP application than a word processor.

Again, it ships with a selection of ready­made templates - including options for HTML emails and presentations as well as websites, interestingly - and a blank docu­ment that lets you design your own site from scratch. Once up and running, you can drag out containers for text and images and use guides, pulled down from the rulers, to keep everything properly aligned.

There are very few restrictions on what you can do with your designs in Freeway, so you can quickly knock up layouts that would be awkward in a regular web design tool. For example, make an oval text frame rather than a box and Freeway will convert it to a graphic on export to preserve its appearance.

These apps are often criticized on vari­ous grounds by web purists, but they can be great ways to get even quite complex sites up and running, like iWeb should have been.

Or then again, try...Other web platforms

Drupal (drupal.org) is a flexible open-source content management system that takes a bit more effort to set up than WordPress, but can form the basis of extensive, professional, news-driven sites, which makes it ideal for sports clubs, businesses, and schools and so on. Again there’s an active community of developers working to extend the platform through add-on modules and themes.

Drupal (drupal.org)

TextPattern (textpattern.com) is a stripped-down content management system that’s great for largely text-based sites, as its name suggests. Typographic layout is particularly well handled, and it uses the Textile system, a shorthand formatting con­vention similar to Markdown (seetextism. com/tools/textile) to speed up your writing, leaving you to concentrate more on what you’re saying while thinking less about how it looks. It’s not as friendly for beginners as WordPress, as it relies in copying and pasting code to extend its features, but once running it’s a lightweight, clean and efficient CMS.

TextPattern (textpattern.com)

Tumblr (tumblr.com) is the new cool kid on the block in blogging platforms, with a stripped-down approach. Accounts are free, and so is hosting, as long as you’re happy to have a .tumblr.com extension on your site. If you’re not, it takes just a couple of tweaks to host it on your own domain. The user dash­board is rich and fully featured, allowing you to incorporate other users’ content into your site with a single click - so even if you’re not inclined to frequently create original content yourself, you can curate the best of the web and build up a following on the strength of your recommendations.

Tumblr (tumblr.com)