Testing & Using Rapid Weaver

As with any web development software, I really like to get my hands dirty - especially software that has pre-built themes. Being a designer, I usually dislike pre-built themes since the tend offer bland, generic styles with little to no direction. Going through Rapid Weavers selection is quite large but still a bit on the boring side, also I want my site to be different, not an obvious canned site.

Before I actually designed anything, I turned to the Rapid Waver website and found a section on developing themes. Ah! So like any good software it's made up of some good 'ole XHTML/CSS with some proprietary RW tags for some of the dynamic content RW does behind the scenes. But before I got knee-deep in building a new site, I checked out some of the great sounding third-party software available which extend the capabilities pretty far for a simple web build app like this.

What I really liked:
I love that you can build a simple website really fast, the templates built-in are better than average and there are enough of them to keep most novice users satisfied. I love that you can easily modify them to create your own, this can require some CSS knowledge or you can simply replace graphics with your own and you have a new layout. I love that you can view the code and see what RW is doing behind the scenes, simply switch to code view and get a look at the actual HTML output. I love the blogging capabilities, simply add a post and you are done. I love the easy 1 button publish feature, unlike iWeb you can post directly to any server to update your site. I love that it supports scripting languages like PHP which you view right in RW! I love that it's completely Mac. This program reeks of Mac love, the iLife integration, drag & drop images, awesome interface, incredible ease of use.

What really annoyed me:
It's really annoying that I cannot easily link small images to a larger image. This is especially crucial in blog posts where I want to only post a small image to click on. It's also really annoying that when I drag and drop an image into my blog, resize it and link to itself to view the larger version- RW actually resized it permanently. It's really annoying that I cannot edit the code in code view, I know it's somewhat what easier to use edit mode (after all, it's name says it all) but sometimes you just want to tweak a bit while you are in code view. It's annoying that RW doesn't offer an easy way to use image based navigation, sometimes you want that look or font that you just can't get with text.

This is all in the past 3 days setting up a new site and creating and building a new theme for this site. I am entirely impressed with it's capabilities and it beats iWeb out of the water. In all, I will be using RW as my main blogging tool for this site and to build some smaller sites for my business. Great product, recommended for all but users with sophisticated needs.