Rapidweaver and Sandvox tests

Yesterday I tried the Realmac software Rapidweaver (RW) and the Karelia Sandvox (SV) for website and webpages creation.

I started with RW demo, only 3 pages to publish (you can publish to –mac or to FTP and more). It’s a nice application, easy –but not as easy as I thought-, has a lot of themes and they’re quite easy to customize. I found nice the side bar but after creating a blog page and a photo album page, I got a bit disorientated as I couldn’t find the way to show the same sidebar from the homepage in these ones. I also find that you need a lot of add-ons, snippets and plug-ins for things like inserting boxes for raw HTML code (like the adsense or the counter code). For me, it was a bit difficult to re-create my iWeb site in short time, one day spent but the result was not satisfactory. To have a collection of photo albums you need Collage. To add buttons you need the Blocks. And for integrated sitemap creation you may need Loghound Sitemap.

So I move on to test SV. I must say it was pretty easy to use and re-create the iWeb site in about 4 hours. Themes, here called Designs, look nice and some look very professional. After choosing a design you can’t customize it as in the other applications but I didn’t care, I found them well built so for me, they don’t require more personalization. For professional web designers this is a minus. Anyway, I loved the features. The collections have the blog and the photo blog and also the photo albums. You have the text pages and more pages to insert. The pagelets, these are very nice features for the sidebar. And if you want to add raw HTML and some advanced features like integrated Google Analytics and Webmasters, you can go Pro. Take in account that the demo version only let you publish the homepage (to .mac and FTP or other).

All of this makes you think about Money. Using a demo made you able to use most of the add-ons for free (for a while), but when you calculate the cost of things together you have at least: RW € 38.04; YourHead (3rd party) applications Blocks € 18.20 and Collage € 7.26; and Loghound (3rd party) Sitemap € 7.73. Total amount €63,50. And you have some more that you’ll find nice, like Accordion or Lockdown, adding some €18 more.

As for SV, you can have it for approximately € 36. And if you need the Pro features, get it for € 58 approx.

So for me, I think I will enroll the list of Sandvox users, that’s if the next iWeb does not meet my spectations (it’s supossedly to come out with the next iLife more or less at the same time as Mac OS Leopard)