Good but relatively inexpen$ive Web Design App?
Can anyone experienced in non-professional web editing/creation software recommend a good but relatively inexpensive application compatible on a PPC-G4? Someone has mentioned Freeway Express which is <$100 as I understand it. Anything roughly equivalent to the old and solid Claris Homepage? What are the options, capabilities and pricing? My need is simple: to create and keep updated a simple family history website with a few embedded links to other sites, perhaps some image files but no animation or sound files. 
Comments
www.realmacsoftware.com
There's also the free Nvu.
www.nvu.com
Have you looked at RapidWeaver?
www.realmacsoftware.com
There's also the free Nvu.
www.nvu.com
I'm no coder, so I'm looking for WYSIWYG.
Anyone have any insight on the pros and cons of RapidWeaver vs. Freeway vs. IWeb vs. Sandvox?
I really don't want to try them all.
RapidWeaver is only $40., and DreamWeaver is likely overkill for me anyway.
I think I'll come out ahead sticking with a lower end web design app.
I liked the editing and templates of iWeb much better than rapidweaver, and I'm hoping that the next release of iWeb significantly improves those site management and uploading issues. In the meantime, that part of it annoys the hell out of me and I often wish that I just stuck with rapidweaver.
Dave
Just looked at the site, and it's more than twice the price of Rapidweaver.
i need to make a webpage for work no matter how simple it may look.
There are basically 2 ways of approaching a web design program. Template and WYSIWYG, with the upper end WYSIWYG programs transitioning to some form of hand coding. Plus of course there are text editors for hand coding.
iWeb and Sandvox take the simple template approach, Rapidweaver and Goldfish take a more complex approach but still template based. They're fast and easy to set up. You can if desired tweak them enough so it's not instantly noticeable as a template from the program. Mainly however you just enter your content and go.
iWeb (included with iLife '06) looks nice but the code (though it does validate) sucks. The pages are large and therefore take a while to load. The URL's are ugly and long. Uploading to other than .mac is a bit of a hassle. It's good for basic pages.
Sandvox is the upscale version (Standard 49 USD and Pro 79 USD), of iWeb more or less. Essentially it fixes iWeb's flaws though it does do a few other things nicely.
Rapidweaver (39.95 USD) is a little different. It's a little more complicated but the basics are easy enough to learn. Plus Rapidweaver has been around for a while so it has more polish and a decent plug-in architecture and themes are around for a couple bucks.
Goldfish (34.95 USD) is a cross between basic templates (avoids iWeb's large files sizes) and a page layout program. It has less features then the other template editors but with greater design functionality and flexibility.
The WYSIWYG editors are all more expensive and more complex. In this group you have Nvu, Seamonkey, Freeway (Express and Pro), GoLive and Dreamweaver.
Nvu (Free) is the basic one. Offers all the basics expected but naturally lacks the features and polish of for-money competitors.
Seamonkey (Free) is related to Nvu. It's decent enough for building a website from scratch, but is better used as the updating tool after you built one using Nvu.
Freeway Express (99 USD, 89 USD download version) takes a different approach. It follows a page layout paradigm similar to Quark Xpress or Adobe Indesign. You're insulated from the code and it cares far more about how the web page will look then the code underneath (which is actually pretty good, though just HTML 4 in the Express version). Editing images in the program is also a nice bonus.
Freeway Pro (279 USD) is indeed a different program the same way Final Cut Express and Pro are different programs. It offers additional features, more polish, and for all those people caring about the code XHTML 1.0 Strict is the top end of the various code exporting options. It is not about hand coding or semantic mark-up and doesn't even do a particularly good job at optimizing for search engines. It really is about design rather then code.
Then we come to the 800 pound gorilla of web development, aside from the hand coders. Dreamweaver (399 USD). It's big, has lots of features, but really is designed for coding. It does offer a good WYSIWYG mode but the cost and learning time for Dreamweaver if you're not a professional makes the other options better.
GoLive (399 USD) is pretty similar in features to Dreamweaver but offers some decent benefits that Dreamweaver lacks. However since Adobe bought Macromedia death ir probable. Otherwise most of the up and downsides are the same.
I personally love Freeway. Primarily because it is at the heart a design/page layout program. It's not about code or templates or even WYSIWYG like the other programs it's generally compared to. It really is about making a website look like how you'd like the website to look. To be fair though the learning curve (unless you know page layout) is higher then Rapidweaver and the template family of programs, but (unless you know Dreamweaver/GoLive) the learning curve is quite a bit less then those and importantly you don't need to learn code. Which is not to say you need to learn code to use Dreamweaver, but that is where the program's strength's reside.
Well I hope the roundup helped.
Try one of the free apps and wait until MWSF2007 to see what improvements iWeb 2.0 gets before purchasing another product. To get an idea of what iWeb can do watch the Quick Tours videos.
Nice review Electric Monk.
Takes a bow. Thank you kindly gentle sir.
I had to go through this a little while ago myself, and so I figured putting it down somewhere would be a good thing.
Plus I dislike the whole learn-to-code thing you get a lot when people ask for help with web development. I personally have more than enough things to do on my plate, and being told to learn code when you really don't have to (unless you're a professional) these days bugs me.
Dreamweaver is going to be the Pro-end of Web Design in the new Adobe/Macromedia Suite and GoLive is being 're-imagined' as a feature-rich iWeb killer for the less technical of us human beens.
Unless you use .mac, you have to "publish to a folder" your whole site and then upload that folder with a separate ftp app. You can't even just edit and upload the individual pages that you change.
You may be interested in this MacOSXHints hint and its associated comments.