Product Reviews

You can build websites the hard way, cranking out those hand-coded pages in BBEdit, or you can take the lazy option and use a GUI web editor such as RapidWeaver. And that's nothing to be ashamed of, especially when the results look stunning, comply with web standards and take a fraction of the time to create.

Version 3.5 updates the interface and adds several welcome new features. Universal Binary status is the most obvious. The basic usage of the application remains much the same: you edit text in one view and then preview how it will look in another. The aqua blue buttons previously used to switch modes have been replaced by a series of iTunes-7-style grey tabs, which look smarter and are easier to use.

Other interface tweaks follow the same thinking: tightening up and simplifying everything. There's also a slick new theme viewer (again, iTunes-inspired) for helping choose how the site will look.

There's some new themes in this release, bringing the

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total on offer to 30 - not including the extras you can download. They're all well made and will give any home-made site a decent professional touch.

But what about the content? The Media Inspector panel has been improved, but it's poorly named as it only lets you inspect images and offers no help with audio and video files. The blogging engine now includes much better archive navigation and decent permanent links for every archived page. On top of the existing RSS feed support, RapidWeaver can now also ping blog aggregators (such as Technorati) whenever your site is updated.

The app now supports Secure FTP for file transfers to hosts, and the simple way it integrates uploading with site editing is a joy to use - much easier than the tedious Export to Folder system in iWeb, which leaves you to upload your files manually. You can view the raw HTML code being generated in the Code tab but you can't edit it. This is a pity, and one of the few drawbacks. Yes, users could risk messing up the templates, but it would be nice to have the option, perhaps with an 'Are you sure you know what you're doing?' dialog.

RapidWeaver has come a long way. It now offers a mature and well-designed environment for throwing together a website with minimum hassle. These latest improvements make it the ideal tool for amateurs wanting a simple route to the web, or even for Dreamweaver and GoLive professionals who want to work on personal projects without feeling like they're on a busman's holiday. Just as long as they don't mind keeping their hands off the raw code.