Sebastian Succeeds with RapidWeaver
I admit it: I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I love web design. Put that together, and you’ve got many dozens of websites being produced for almost the same purpose – with each new revision replacing the last. This is the never ending cycle that is Blue Pyjama’s website. The latest tool that I’ve been trying is RapidWeaver from RealMacSoftware.
Screenshot of RapidWeaver
RapidWeaver is a halfway house between iWeb and raw HTML coding. RapidWeaver has over 40 professional themes that look really cool. There are business themes, school themes, blog themes and more! RapidWeaver has a plugin architecture that allows you to purchase more themes for your site. RealMacSoftware advises that you keep one theme for your whole site but allows you to have specific themes for each and every page.
Once you’ve set a theme you then have to add content. You do this by clicking “Add”. You are then prompted to specify a type of page; HTML, styled text, Blog, contact form, download page and more and of course you can install more using plug-ins. If you have even a vague knowledge of HTML I would advise choosing and HTML page for the majority of your content because A. it will follow the CSS styling that your theme provides and B. you have so much more control over everything from the point size to the colour of links (w00t go HTML – yes, I am a web designer).
RapidWeaver allows you to nest pages inside pages to create structures like “About Me>>My Dog>>My Dogs’ Friend” and have content on every page in the hierarchy. This is useful for me because I can do things like “Applications>>iPhone>>iDoku”. This doesn’t work in all themes so make sure that you do some testing before you go live.
A great part of the Application is “Snippets”. You can jot down snippets of text, HTML or images that you use frequently on your website and just but clicking on your snippet, have it inserted into wherever you are typing. Example: “123 Cars speaks Martian and Saturnus [space languages]. We are open on Tuesdays until 4pm”. This would be really tedious to type over and over.
RapidWeaver 4.2 sells for $79 (62€) from RealMacSoftware. I really like this application and encourage you to try it.
The web site that I’ve been testing RapidWeaver on is http://beta.bluepyjama.com. Your feedback on that site is much appreciated.
If you really want to expand on the capabilities of RW, check out some of the addons that are out there. I have quite a few but have unfortunately shifted gears to writing most of my sites in WordPress. I DO know though that when I need a static site – RW will be sitting there waiting for me to fire it up.
While it looks pretty impressive, I haven't coded a static site in at least 3 years, personal or professional.
I think this would be really great for quick promotional sites, like when you first buy a domain name, or when you need to get a holding page for a subdomain up. But beyond that, I just don't know if it would be worth that kinda money.
I'd say take that money, spend it on Panic's Coda, and study some books on O'Reilly. After a few sites, you should have some fairly repeatable templates in your personal arsenal that could go up just as quick, or quicker, than a RW-made site.
Just my opinion though. Overall, great looking piece of software, and pretty nice write up on it.
I beg to differ there is a lot more to RW than just building a static site and there is a large active developer community. If you are going to use something like Coda that's trying to be a web design IDE, why not go all the way and use Taco HTML or Textmate and CSSEdit etc. those tools are cheaper and more powerful than Coda is at their individual functions. and if you really want to get away from static, drupal, etc. is the way to go. It's not hard to highly customize the templates you get with RW and there are many thousands of them out there. RW is really great at what it does and makes really rapid design very easy. Expresso is interesting too if you want even more flexibility and freedom, but desire something like an IDE that Coda (or Dreamweaver desire to be).
Thanks for Sharing the Information, and keep Working like that!