Living the Low End: Web Design

Today, as promised, I will be talking about web designing on older macs. Many web designers feel that they need the latest machines to run web design and image manipulation applications. I debunked the later last week by showing you seashore which is a more than capable web image solution. I personally know a bit of HTML and XHTML code but it's really not practical to design websites by hand (please spare me the hate mail). If you really want to hand code I think you can find your way to the text editor or Textwrangler. But I'm focusing on WYSIWYG editors (or: What You See Is What You Get), the industry standard WYSIWYG editor is Dream Weaver. Unfortunately Dream Weaver is ridiculously expensive and very bloated. I'm going to examine a great open
source, free, and powerful editor called Kompozer.


I must confessed I'm no master at web designing but I know my way around Dream Weaver. Kompozer seems capable of the basic elements of designing web sites. I do miss the Flash integration and the built in image mapping tool, though. I'm building a social networking site at the moment it seems more than capable of designing complex web sites.


On to performance, Kompozer ran nicely on my Power Mac G4 Graphite (400mhz 512mb RAM). There was no noticeable slow down of any kind on my machine. Even intensive tasks like adding in videos and things were instant, there was never any slow down at rendering the page as well. Kompozer can be found at http://www.kompozer.net/ .
This week I also used the program iWeb, part of iLife 2006. iWeb works very well if you have a .Mac account; in fact, I strongly recommend using it for basic page design if you do, but if you do not it's very difficult to post it on any other web server. I had issues when trying to place it on a server. I used FTP and uploaded all the files, the problem was some of the file names had characters that would not be recognized by other servers so I tried to rename the files and post them up but now parts of the files are missing (probably because I renamed their sources). All in all, it was serious pain to do without .Mac. Getting around that, iWeb is an incredible program that allows non-tech savvy people to create beautiful looking websites and simple blogs. iWeb isn't very flexible so it shouldn't be used for anything more than a basic personal page or web blog.


If you like the idea of iWeb but want more flexibility and an easier time to upload to servers, I suggest you look at RapidWeaver ( http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/).
The low end Mac user has many options to make websites and create images. Low end users have many alternatives, most of which discussed here are free! Just adding to my crusade, you can edit and create art, and make beautiful and powerful websites on a low end mac. If you have any questions about any thing we discussed here or any comments on my articles please feel free to email me at . Next week I will be writing about editing audio and using Garage Band.