Moving a company website

joshgoodacre

Hi,

I'm after a better solution for the design of this company website - www.markgoodacre.com

It is currently designed and maintained in iWeb but I have found the website to be sluggish and slow to load. Also meta information and SEO has been awquard to say the least.
My web design 'skill' goes as far as iWeb. Would it be easy to replicate this site in rapidweaver? If so would the basic program be enough or would I need to be shopping for plugins?

Thanks,

Josh

Will Woodgate

Hi Josh,

Yes you could easily replicate this type of site design in RapidWeaver. You probably would not need to purchase any additional plugins beyond what RapidWeaver comes supplied with already. Certainly there would be scope to improve the SEO of your website and produce pages that load much faster than they currently do.

You would probably need to obtain a basic 'minimalist' theme (template) if you are not able to achieve the same design with the themes supplied with RapidWeaver. There are a number of free third-party themes available with a clean and minimal style, which might be perfect. Some of these themes are inspired by existing iWeb templates.

On the homepage and gallery page, a normal Styled Text page style could be used. The sidebar in a theme could be utilised to create a 2-column layout. For the contact page, you could use the Contact Form plugin supplied with RapidWeaver, and again make use of a sidebar to display address information. To build a gallery index, you could probably use the iPhoto Album plugin supplied with RapidWeaver.

One thing you may find different with RapidWeaver is the editing of header and banner background images. iWeb uses a drag-and-drop approach, but RapidWeaver uses images which are embedded within the theme itself. Editing theme images is very easy if you use a free plugin like RapidWeaver MultiTool: http://www.rwmultitool.com/

Gizmo2341

one addition to your very nice "review" will:
if you want a more iweb like drag and drop you could check out stacks and blocks, 2 plugins that are quite nice.
i personally thaugth i would use blocks more because it is really like iweb but i ended up using stacks on nearly all my pages.


oh and before i forget:
welcome to the forum!

JohnJ

I like your overall design. Your biggest problem is that the pictures were not properly set up for the web. Your one home page picture is pushing half a meg. The 2 I checked could be made at least 4x smaller. I use the save for web feature in PS. Others could tell you of cheaper alternatives. I tested one of your 250 k pictures that could of looked identical and been a mere 32k and looked the same.

This forum is great. Welcome.

MerchantServicesAmerica

Hello everyone,

I too am new here, and converted over to RapidWeaver a couple of days ago from Yahoo browser based web builder, lol. I am semi technical, but was looking to add pre made HTML code from "Constant Contact" and other service providers for our business website.

As you know, it's impossible to add HTML code using yahoo web builder. So, I made a huge jump into RapidWeaver. The pre set themes seem easy enough to use, but I am still struggling with how to customize images in background of the web pages. But, I decided to investigate third party themes, and saw Eikona Three theme - loved the look and especially the images in it's preview. http://archetypon.net/preview/eikona/three/

I purchased it, and of course had no idea it doesn't come with the parachute images that I saw on their preview. I guess my question is, what is the easiest way to add images in order to customize page background of themes whether 3rd party of pre installed on RW? I have completed a bunch of online vid tutorials via membership to rapidweaver classroom. But, still confused..

Sorry for the long post, and I hope after spending my first 20 hours playing with RapidWeaver, that I will actually get good enough at using it to re-build my web site.

Thanks
Paul

Jive Dig

I don't know that theme in particular. . .but lots of people are happy with http://www.rwmultitool.com/
I use ThemeMiner.

You can also check out the Bg Stretcher Stack from RWExtras http://rwextras.com/stretcher/bgstretcher.html
(you need the Stacks plugin from YourHead for this option. A great and powerful tool if you haven't checked it out yet.

MerchantServicesAmerica

Thanks a lot for the reply!

Is there a good tutorial on how to use these products you listed? I just purchased RW a few days ago, and I'm still learning RW - not quite even intermediate level yet, so I want to make my life easier as possible using all these plug ins you mentioned. Any info to point me in right direction is much appreciated!

Thanks!

Jive Dig

If you're new I would start with Stacks. Watch the video on yourhead.com. There's lots of sites with info. RapidweaverClassroom if you want to pay for immediate, thorough tutorials. There's a book floating around somewhere too. Or read all around the Add-Ons section of Realmac's website.

RWMultitool has it's own instructions. They are very simple once you understand how RapidWeaver works.

MerchantServicesAmerica

Hi, thanks again. I downloaded Blocks, stacks, RW multi tool and the BG Stretcher set. Assuming these plug ins will be a good enough foundation to start creating and customizing web pages easily compared to just plain rapid weaver. I'll start watching tutorials on stacker, then blocks and then the other plug ins to start immediately.

I've spent 3-4 full days learning in RW Classroom, and want to start creating already. Getting very impatient, lol. Will start with Stacker Tutorial now as you suggest, and then move on to the tutorials for the other plug ins. Thanks for pointing me in right direction. Hope to be capable of actually using RW by tonight instead of stuck in learning mode for what seems like an eternity....zzzz.lol. Thanks again.

Jive Dig

Depending on what you want to accomplish, you should be able to make nice websites with the stock Rapidweaver and a nice 3rd party theme. . . NCD, BLT, Elixir, etc. . .

If you want to jump right into advanced stuff i would keep reeeaaadddinnngg. I learned RW with my recording studio website build. Took me a few months and lots of money in stacks to complete it. It worked fine for a few months, then i completely redesigned it once my RW skill went to another level.

I learned how to do things the right way, and the simplest way. It's easy to get carried away with heavy stacks/plugins, cluttered content areas and overusing Extra Content areas and Pluskit. The latter, EC/Pluskit is extremely powerful in combination with the stacks plugin, but like i said. . .you can get carried away and make more work and make your website less user friendly. Try to keep it clean and simple! Build your site for the user, not for yourself.