Web Site Tools Add Sophistication To Web Pages.

You’re building a web site and you want some cool features but don’t know how to implement them? Try point and click.

Add this list of tools to the Mac’s top-rated web tool, RapidWeaver, and a complex, sophisticated, Web 2.0 web site is just clicks away.

First, a little background. Producing a quality, feature-laden web site has never been easier with mature applications such as the popular RapidWeaver. A complex web site with a blog, a photo gallery, movies, and so on, has never been easier.

If you’ve tried RapidWeaver then you’re probably impressed with how easy it is to set up web pages, navigation, and a few nifty features. But Web 2.0 is all the rage these days.

What if you want more sophisticated features in your site and don’t know how to code XHTML, CSS, or Javascript?

Your Head to the rescue. Your Head offers five highly complex tools, plug-ins, to RapidWeaver’s basic set, giving you the sophistication of Web 2.0 without all the headaches of coding that complexity.

Collage
If your site has a few photo albums it would be nice to have a single page with links to each album, but using a photo to represent the album. That’s what Collage does.

Create photo links with reflections, drop-shadows, glow-effects, borders, outlines, and more—just point and click. No thinking required.

Carousel
Some so-called Web 2.0 sites have zooming graphic links. They’re iconic, easy to use, take up little space, and they’re a pain to code. Try Carousel.

What you get is a bar of photo or graphic thumbnails that zoom from side to side, perfect for animated photo albums—and it’s all drag and drop, point and click.

Blocks
One of the problems with point and click web page tools is the difficulty to create a customized page, different than the cookie-cutter templates. Enter Blocks.

Blocks lets you drop in any element you want within a “block” within a web page. HTML, Javascript, PHP, Flickr badge or Digg button. All the stuff you want to add to a custom page but can’t without coding, now you can without coding.

Accordion
This is my favorite RapdiWeaver plug-in, by far. You’ve seen the accordian style on some web sites—click on a headline or graphic, and text or graphics expand below to reveal more detail. That’s a pain to create when you can’t code more than a 10-digit speed dial phone number.

Accordion creates a dynamic interactive menu interface for text and graphics. Point and click. If you can say AJAX, spell AJAX, but don’t know AJAX, then you’ll like Accordian.

Columns
Have you ever wondered why more web sites don’t have multiple columns like newspapers?

They’re a pain to implement. Unless you use Columns in RapidWeaver.

Adding columns to a page is now point and click simple. Two columns, flexible gutter, flexible width—even add borders, backgrounds, and so on.

YourHead’s plug-in tools for RapidWeaver are elegant, simple to use, sophisticated, and affordable. If you want a web site with bells and whistles, start with RapidWeaver, finish it off with YourHead.

What’s missing? Frankly, not much. It takes awhhile to get the hang of Carousel as there are many, many settings, but it’s still point and click. Ditto for Accordion, which has some complex configuration, but it’s all visual.

Columns couldn’t be easier. Blocks is very difficult because there’s more you can do, especially if you use plenty of Javascript or PHP in your site. Collage is a perfect entry page for a site with many photo albums.

Sorry, the plug-ins are not free, but they are highly sophisticated, contain complex solutions, and even when added to the cost of RapidWeaver, are affordable.