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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.
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4 comments:
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.
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
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.
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.
seoras
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