Rapidweaver Review « The BEST Apple Hardware and Software Reviews

Written By Editor December 7th, 2009

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Ever needed to make a professional looking website powered by it’s very own Desktop based content manager – easily and quickly?

Impossible you say?

Step in Rapidweaver. Rapidweaver is quite possibly the most powerful yet incredibly accessible site builder ever! This app has the smallest learning curve of any on the market, it makes Dreamweaver look like a 16 x 16 foot super-computer with 3,000,000 buttons – all of which seemingly lack clarity and a function. In this analogy, Rapidweaver would be a Mac Mini. Super powerful, compact and it only has 1 button, because let’s face it, that’s all we need… Simple.

Features

• RapidWeaver creates clean, beautiful code that adheres to modern web standards.
• CSS / HTML / PHP code inline editing
• Powerful (and numerous) plug-ins – turn Rapidweaver into an e-commerce package or add Uploaders, sliders and more with only a few clicks of your mouse.
• Insanely easy to use interface – RapidWeaver makes use of Drag & Drop and simple iconography in order to make a very clean and uncluttered interface. This goes a long way to making RW fun to use
• Automatic Navigation building – RW automatically creates the menu for your site. This is a real time saver and helps to avoid broken links.
• Fast, easy publishing – RW makes FTP and MobileMe publishing a one-click process.

The awesome looking RW home-screen. Sets your expectations for whats to come, has a little news and a link to the support site, which is very impressive.

Support videos on the RapidWeaver site make the app even easier to learn on a more advanced level…

The interface [blank mode]

The standard options (apart for the shopping cart which is a premium add-on) for creating pages. These include:

• Blog – supports podcasting, RSS feeds and more!
• Contact form (with easy edit form fields)
• File Sharing (for sharing files)
• HTML code (creating raw content-code pages)
• iFrame – including an iFrame within the Rapidweaver themes
• Movie Album – does what it says on the tin
• Offsite page (redirect)
• Photo Album, powered by iPhoto for easy gallery creation
• QuickTime (for including Quicktime movies)
• Styled Text – creates a static page of your choice

Full featured! Imagine the time it would take to configure wordpress to this level!!

Adding a new blog post, with options for a podcast and full category / tag support.

The Editing box, the lower task bar handles all tags such as H1, block quotes e.t.c

Zoomed in Blog post editor

Themes

Included are dozens of professionally designed themes. These themes all look pretty great, but a few of them are head and shoulders above the selection on offer. These 2 below in particular look amazing, and would take considerable time coding and designing from scratch. Thumbs up on template design RapidWeaver! Of Course you can customize and download new themes if you choose.

Configuring your site using an easy to use drag and drop setting screen!

Support for analytics and SEO friendly urls.

Really advanced template stuff.

Creating a gallery page takes a pleasing second or two

Within literally minutes we have a wonderful looking site, with a gallery…

Contact form…

And even a shopping cart if we choose…

Verdict

Perfection is one of the most difficult states to achieve. But I think RapidWeaver are there. A very clever app, well priced and crammed so full of features its bulging at the seams. A great job guys! I’ll be recommending RapidWeaver to everyone from now on, bloggers to travellers…. enjoy RapidWeaving!

RapidWeaver is a powerful yet friendly web design application made exclusively for the Mac. RapidWeaver allows you to quickly publish beautiful standards-based blogs, podcasts, photo albums and slideshows. With your site ready to go live, RapidWeaver uploads your finished site with just one click to MobileMe, FTP or SFTP servers.

RapidWeaver is available for $79 from http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/