Thursday, November 29, 2007

Progress On Website Development

I have checked out the various suggestions made and followed a number of leads of my own, asked questions and had some replies. Dave suggested checking out Rapidweaver, a programme on the Mac for website development.

I checked out their site and was immediately attracted by the statement that it could be easily updated without republishing all the files - a flaw with many simpler publishing programmes and templates. When you have 300 images - uploading can take 24 hours!

I found a link to a couple of web videos, one their own and the other by screencastsonline.

Current status is that I have purchased this very inexpensive software, along with a couple of plugins and have been able in minutes to make the beginnings of a site, with ideas on how I'll do the whole thing, even including my blog if I want. I still can't get the uploading feature to work (wrong settings somewhere) so export it and upload it with Fetch, but it works. This weekend I'll have a real go at creating the site.

If curious, you can follow my progress here

Is this my final decision? No, I could easily decide part way through that it isn't right for me, but I think it will be alot better than staring at an empty Dreamweaver screen with little idea of what I want or how to get there.

These tutorials and reviews and so on on screencasts . They pertain to macs only but after years of being the poor relation, it doesn't hurt to be top dog for a change. There may well be pc programmes that are similar but of course are no use to me so I don't study the market.

I have discovered one problem already, other pages don't show up - they do if you roll the mouse over them but otherwise not - perhaps black on black - will have to check when I get home tonight.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

A few months ago I started using Rapidweaver and have been very pleased with it's ease of use. My two qualms is that it's missing an 'upload only changes' feature - something that Dreamweaver, GoLive, etc all have. Also images are by default converted to png format which takes up a lot more space (and time to upload) than jpegs. You *can* specify jpeg for each 'page' but you'll loose transparency on things like icons, navigation pointers, etc. IOW it's all jpeg or all png but not a mix - at least not easily. Workaround is to manually upload the required png files.

George Barr said...

There is an update feature on the upload. As I'm still struggling with the basic upload, I can't confirm it works but noted Don using in the screencasts tutorials so hopefully partial uploads are possible. As to png I didn't notice, will check my site and see.

George

Anonymous said...

One of the other features in Rapidweaver that appealed to me -- although I haven't used it (yet) -- is its support for Flash. I'm planning to create Flash-based photo albums in Lightroom and then integrating them with Rapidweaver. Not sure how easy this will be to do, but perhaps it's a direction you want to investigate as well, George.

Anonymous said...

George,

You really must have a look at Freeway which in my opinion is the only Mac web software worth looking at. Either their full version or their 'Express' lite version.
Its a very easy program to use and an incredably helpful forum if you get into trouble.


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