Convalesco

Me and my friends like snowboarding. So considering all the hype and my hobby, which is the www and operating systems such as Linux and MacOSX, I decided to make a website that will deal with snowboard. I created the website boarders.gr using a CMS. The visitors are not much, of course I didn’t publish the website to popular websites which I had easy access, because I know the admin, or even my blog which has a small amount of regulars. So I decided to use Sandvox, then I downloaded Rapidweaver and then I tried to create something using iWeb. The problem is that I don’t want to give money to the MobileMe thing. I tried the trial version and didn’t convince me at all. I own the domain name already and I have some free space on dreamhost. So iWeb is tricky if used without MobileMe. However, which one is the best for what I want to do? I tried them all!

Rapidweaver is a great tool for an average user which knows at least how a website looks like from a structured perspective. It’s a solid piece of software, with no bugs or just a few (I have not found any) and a decent community. The developers seem to be much user friendly and you probably get a quick reply. It’s quite for personal website building, it uses Haloscan to manage user blog comments and has many themes for a single package. All these come at a high, in my personal opinion, price of 79 $.

Sandvox is the easier, most user friendly application for web development. It lacks of some features and the look and feel of Rapidweaver. It’s much more easy to understand at a glance, compared to RW, because it has the standard preview editing mode. So you actually create, delete, edit on the website. It has enough themes to suit the average user needs. It’s blog RSS support was broken at 1.3 version. Now Sandvox is at 1.5 version and seems to have get over these bugs. However… It’s very buggy. I’d say that it was not ready for an official yet. I’ve been using Sandvox since it was a ‘beta’. Then I bought it. I still use it for personal websites that I quickly like to setup on my linux server, but even for a blog engine or a small personal website, I prefer wordpress by far. However, it fails many times when you switch themes and it fails to handle images correctly when you remote them and add them again. Same goes for pagelets. It’s not stable, period. I’ve lost 4 hours of work because I forgot to save and it crashed. I know that it says in the website that it has auto-save features in preview mode, but that’s nonsense. I just lost everything.

The iWeb platform is not bug free, but it’s in the 2.0 version and seems to be pretty stable. I worked a lot with iWork Pages and I was able to use iWeb promptly because of the similarities. The image editing is the same, the themes are much more beautiful than Rapidweavers or Sandvox’s. The interesting thing with iWeb, except it’s superior looks, is that it let’s you place image everywhere and it acts like a Pages documents. you can do whatever you have in mind. I find iWeb to be much more flexible in this area, compared to the other two.

The problem with iWeb is that, you need MobileMe in order to work for you flawlessly. The 79$ per year subscription is a bit too much for me. I already pay for webhosting at DreamHost and I own the domain name already. Plus, what if my users ask me a forum? From what I know I don’t have PHP or MySQL support and if I do, I can’t image what would be the price for it. It’s a bit of an insult to Apple users the MobileMe policy.

I still have to decide what to do, I would love to be able to use iWeb, but the MobileMe trial is about to expire and I will cancel the subscription because I consider the price high, plus the fact that it’s not extensible at all. Same goes of course for sandvox and rapidweaver but there, I will be able to create a link and put a php-forum on DreamHost like www.mywebsite.com/forum.

Anyway, if you are looking for a website builder at this point: You can buy the MobileMe bundle and use iWeb or use Rapidweaver if you already pay for web hosting. Rapidweaver is not cheap but it’s mature and it will not blow in your face like Sandvox.