Build A Web Site On Your Mac. Tips From A to Z.

Web sites come in all sizes, shapes, colors, and capabilities. Some are simple. Many are complex.

With Apple’s iWeb application, now available in iLife ‘06, web sites that look good are no longer difficult to make.

They’re downright easy. Point click. Drag and drop. What you see is what you get.

Consider the following to a primer, an overview of using your Mac to build a web site (or many sites) using tools of the trade.

What Do You Want?
Assume you have an idea for a web site. If it’s to be a simple site with a dozen or so pages, you’re in luck, as tools abound to make it an easy project.

What if your site will be more complex, have regularly updated content, multiple sections, and require a nested menu structure?

With web sites it does not take long to go from utterly simple to utterly complex. A few dozen web pages in a site can be developed in minutes or hours.

Alter the requirements, and the simple site becomes weeks of planning and building.

XHTML and CSS
Start here. The web has standards, Microsoft’s attempts to thwart them notwithstanding. Learn what you can about the basics of XHTML and CSS.

Why? If it’s all point and click these days, why worry about the underlying code?

Trust me. It’s worth it to know a little about what you can do and why, and what you can’t do and why not.

Think of XHTML as the framework that holds your content. CSS is the design framework that controls how the content looks. A little knowledge of each is a good start.

Basic Editors
With knowledge of XHTML and CSS you can build web pages with any decent text editor. Even TextEdit in OS X will work. Or TextWrangler.

Learn the code, type it in, check it in your browser, build the web site pages.

It’ll take awhile. You’ll need to learn the code, learn some tricks, practice for weeks or months or years, learn everything you need to know about the concept of trial and error, and in the end?

You’ll have a web site. Maybe. That assumes you don’t get frustrated first, because building sites by hand, line by line, is a tedious process.

Modern Editors - Cheap
Fortunately, web site building is becoming more mature and there are plenty of applications to help you build. The cost ranges from zero (as in “beer") to thousands of dollars.

Your mileage may vary, but here’s a broad stroke look at some modern web site builders (editors) that may help you reduce the weeks and months and years, to mere days and weeks.

At the free end, we’ll recommend that you look at Nvu. Basic web pages are relatively easy to construct and don’t require much knowledge of HTML or CSS. Nvu uses the web page editor from Mozilla.

These editors require you to build a web site page by page by freakin’ page. One page at a time. You have to remember the web page names, the links, and you’re in total control of the site’s organization.

As you’ll find after about a dozen pages in your site, managing complexity becomes more important than just creating the pages and filling them with content and graphics.

Modern Editors - Not So Cheap
Adobe and Macromedia (now just Adobe) have made a fortune selling tools to build web sites and manage web sites.

Adobe’s GoLive is for the creative mind, while Macromedia’s Dreamweaver appealed more to those of us less creative, but with a requirement for a smaller learning curve and easier organization.

Both tools do a good job of building simple web sites and more complex sites, and provide the necessary tools to manage much larger sites.

For example, let’s say you used a text editor or simple XHTML editor to build your site. There’s 12 pages, and they all link together. The pages have a common logo, common links, and similar look and feel, though each page was constructed individually.

Now you need to change the menu structure a bit, or modify some links, or change the layout. What was relatively simple has now become enormously complex.

Each of the 12 pages in the site needs to be reworked, or worse, rebuilt. See? Simple became complex.

Tools such as Dreamweaver are more complex to master, though they make trivial the problem above.

In Dreamweaver (and other, more expensive tools), you can set up pages and a site so that a change to a logo is replicated across all pages. A change to a menu structure is changed on all other pages.

It’s about as easy to handle a dozen pages as it is to handle hundreds of pages. If you have the right tool.

Design Tools - Cheap and not so Cheap
Designing a web site is different from building the underlying code and organization. Design is about look and feel; which graphic elements go where, how the page is laid out, how the site is organized for navigation.

GoLive and Dreamweaver won’t help you much with design, as there’s an underlying assumption that design is up to the designer (that doesn’t prohibit Adobe from selling you plenty of expensive design tools).

Apple’s premise with iWeb is that it’s a new tool that makes attractive web page design easy. That’s true. As long as you stay within Apple’s set of templates.

If you use iWeb’s templates, they’re cheap, easy, and good looking; even stunning. Except there’s not many templates so your web site’s pages will look pretty much like every other iWeb user.

iWeb is attractive but the beauty is only skin deep. Nested menus are a pain to create. A site with more than a few dozen pages becomes horribly difficult to manage.

Tools To Design And Manage
iWeb is on the right track. So are other new tools such as Sandvox and Rapidweaver.

Sandvox shows great promise for design and provides a true drag and drop, point and click approach to creating those ever needed attractive web pages.

Managing dozens of pages is much easier using Rapidweaver. While some of the themes (templates) are gaudy and plain, many new ones are attractive worthy of consideration if your site is small, but may grow to dozens of pages that still need to be managed.

Rapidweaver is mature, stable, affordable, and easy to use for simple and moderately complex sites. Nested menus are a breeze. Drag and drop to reorganize.

The themes often have options for color schemes and layout modifications. Plus, built in are components that control basic text pages with graphics, and photo albums, movie albums, a web log (blog), and much more.

Rapidweaver’s code is usually XHTML and CSS compliant, and uploading a site or changes can be set up to be nearly automatic (few clicks).

For simple sites, or moderate sites that are growing in content and becoming more complex, Rapidweaver is a good choice. RW removes the complexity of XHTML and CSS for most users, adds in site management tools, yet offers a professional look and feel (depends on the theme used-- some are awful, some superb).

If you’re new to web site design and building, Rapidweaver is the choice to get started. It’s nearly as easy as iWeb, produces better code, is more mature and has more features. There’s more room to grow with Rapidweaver.

While iWeb is great for a couple dozen web pages that look great, Rapidweaver is excellent for dozens of pages, nested menus, and better site organization and management.

Dreamweaver and GoLive can handle much larger, more complex sites, but you’re left on your own to figure out the design, management requirements, and organizational structure of the site.

For all that extra work on your part, you get to pay more money for the tools, too.

There’s more. Click Here for Page 2.

Off Topic Note: I’ve updated the Mac360 Store with over 100 new categories-- More Macs, more iPods, more Mac books, more software. Click Here and select any category for more detail, or use the handy search function. Whenever you buy from Amazon through the Mac360 Store you help support Mac360. Finally, what is it about her Mac that caught Kate MacKenzie’s hair on fire? Somehow or another she fell out of love with her Mac and rushed into the arms of Windows Vista. Read the details about her American Tragedy.