RapidWeaver
Review by: Katie
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/
Price: $39.99

I have three websites that I manage, this one for MacPeople, one personal site and one professional site. Until a few months ago, none of them looked very good. I used GoLive and was able to get sites that functioned and looked just okay, but updates were a pain and they took literally days to build. I didn’t want or need anything super-fancy, I just wanted something that worked, was easy to update and looked clean and professional. One of my favorite podcasts, ScreenCasts Online did a series on RapidWeaver that peeked my interest and I haven’t looked back!.

RapidWeaver is extremely easy to use. You don’t have to know any html coding and the menus and functions are very intuitive. Websites are all built around a theme and there are a dozen or so types of pages to choose from. Using a simple stylized text page you can format text and graphics and include links, good for basic information pages. There are also specialized pages specifically for blogs, photo albums, creating contact forms, and more. Using a combination of these pages you can produce a very versatile website, and because each page incorporates with the others because they’re all built on the same thing, everything looks good.

The MacPeople website you’re looking at now probably in total took less than 2 hours to build initially. Much of that time was spent figuring out which theme I wanted to use and how I wanted to arrange the website. Once I got the “outline” of the site figured out, it was a very simple process of copying and pasting text from our previous website in, and spicing it up a bit by incorporating some of our own graphics. The beauty of it is once the site is built, it’s very simple to add updates. I typically take notes at our meetings of various topics discussed during our “Q&A” sessions and by taking notes right in RapidWeaver, I had our entire website updated with the meeting notes and uploaded during our 10 minute snack break (and still had time to grab a slice of cake!). The night after the meeting I came home downloaded the photos I took with my digital camera into iPhoto, and within 10 minutes created a photo album page, linked it to our current page and uploaded the site. Normally this is a process that could have taken an hour or more.

Third party developers have also started developing plug-ins for RapidWeaver. There are literally hundreds of various themes available as well as dozens of plug-ins that allow for new webpage options. A few of my favorite Plug-ins are from YourHead software and include an “blocks” plug-in that allow you to freely move elements on a page, including incorporate html code to give you a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style of design.

RapidWeaver has won me over. For personal websites and those of small businesses, it’s a very easy and affordable way to create and maintain a website without spending a lot of time or money. Yet one more gem the Mac Community has to be thankful for. Try finding software like this on a PC!

For those getting started with RapidWeaver, here are the links to the ScreenCasts Online tutorials I mentioned above:
http://screencastsonline.com/sco/Shows/files/category-15.html#unique-entry-id-18
http://screencastsonline.com/sco/Shows/files/category-15.html#unique-entry-id-13
http://screencastsonline.com/sco/Shows/files/category-15.html#unique-entry-id-3
http://screencastsonline.com/sco/Shows/files/category-15.html#unique-entry-id-58