RAGE Software helps Mac users easily design professional websites and get. For best search engine rankings; Make your website load faster; Easy web hosting. RAGE Software's Sitemap Automator is fully Webmaster Tools compliant. Even if you’ve never learned HTML, these apps will help you create professional websites with ease. Anyone with a text editor, a good grasp of, and enough time on their hands can create a beautiful website. But what if you don’t have time to brush up on your coding skills? What if squinting at a page full of code makes your head hurt? Or what if you’re, you know, lazy? A bumper crop of Mac apps has sprung up to help people in just such a predicament, applying a friendly front end and familiar tools to the ever-more-complicated word of web coding. While none of the three polished apps we review here will be perfect for everyone, chances are that one of them has the right feature set to fit your needs. • • • TurboWeb Though it’s by far the least expensive option in this roundup — roughly $60 cheaper than its two rivals! — TurboWeb packs an impressive amount of power for its low price. It offers a freeform, drag-and-drop interface for placing text, images, and more. I particularly liked the customizable grid and guides that let you impose some order on what might otherwise be chaos. Each element you place on the page snaps automatically to the nearest guide, or into alignment with neighboring elements. Unique among this lineup, TurboWeb boasts a huge, searchable library of royalty-free stock photos — a big help for zero-budget designers who want to spice up an otherwise text-heavy site. I also enjoyed TurboWeb’s instant access to my personal Pictures folder and iPhoto or Photos library. That said, you can’t search through those libraries from within TurboWeb, so if you’ve got a pile of pictures on your hard drive, be prepared to do a lot of scrolling until you find the one you want. I also found it odd that I couldn’t use any of the program’s stock photos in its photo-carousel widget. On the whole, TurboWeb does most of what you’d want it to perfectly adequately, including a bare-bones but functional way to upload your site to the FTP server of your choice (or sign up for TurboWeb’s own recommended hosting provider). The online help files are simple but sufficient as well. Nonetheless, TurboWeb fell short in a few key areas. I couldn’t get text to wrap around an image for the life of me. I couldn’t create a button with different active, hover, or default states. TurboWeb’s short list of font options can’t be changed or expanded. Responsive design support — allowing you to display the same pages differently on devices with different-sized screens — was rudimentary at best; you can swap between desktop and tablet versions, but if you’ve finished creating one layout, you’ll have to start all over from a blank page to create the other. And TurboWeb’s ability to edit and apply custom classes is rudimentary at best. It applies only to text — not images, buttons, or anything else — and offers no control over margins or padding. • $19.99 – EverWeb Like TurboWeb, EverWeb offers a similar drag-and-drop interface (albeit without the handy grid or guides) and overall feature set, with the same limitations when it comes to customizing CSS style elements on your pages. And it shares TurboWeb’s somewhat clunky approach to “responsive design,” requiring you to create a whole separate set of mobile counterpart pages to those on your desktop site. It lacks TurboWeb’s sizable stock image library, but makes up for it by automatically supporting any of Google’s extensive library of free fonts, once you’ve downloaded and installed them on your Mac. So why should you even consider shelling out $60 more than TurboWeb for EverWeb? First, EverWeb boasts outstanding help files, including an extensive and well-written manual running more than 100 pages, along with available right from the app’s opening screen. Second, EverWeb’s publishing tools are somewhat more robust, with more options for FTP server info, and the ability to add custom header/footer code and even a favicon for your site. And finally — and perhaps most importantly, if you need it — EverWeb builds in the ability to set up a basic online store, including buy buttons and a shopping cart, using PayPal. Few other web design apps offer anything like this — neither TurboWeb nor Blocs do — and those that do often charge extra for the privilege. With the few exceptions I’ve noted, like TurboWeb’s searchable stock photo database, EverWeb does basically everything that TurboWeb does, but just a little bit better. However, unless you want to set up your own online store quickly, easily, and inexpensively, EverWeb may not be better enough to merit paying four times TurboWeb’s price.
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March 2019
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