No, not really. You can probably fudge it but itās not what RW is good at.
You can use Inspect Element and look at the code but I suspect you want to be able to edit the code. In which case, no.
An existing page built using something else? No. Again, there are probably ways to fudge it using an HTML page type but itās not what Rapidweaver is designed for.
Iāve found that once you get the hang of it that RW is so quick to work with that itās pretty straightforward to grab bits off an existing site and re-work them in Rapidweaver.
I think RealMac still does a demo version though, limited to a page or two so you can try it out for yourself.
Thanks, Rob! Looks like Iāve got to keep looking! Rats, I thought this would work for me! But thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!-
āMJ
If youāve got the time and they still do a free demo version, Iād urge you to take a look. RW really is a great way to build websites and may persuade you to change the way you think about the best way to design them.
Iāve got an entire site built. I like the design. I just hate the thought of starting over! Just wish I could import the basic design! Or make my own template!
You sound like you re looking for an HTML editor - RapidWeaver is not that. Itās a theme and plugin based web authoring tool. It can build from themes and plugin things that would take days of hand coding in an hour or even less, but wonāt work like Kompozer or similar.
Flux by The Escapers can work that way, but in the end wonāt offer you the level of help that RapidWeaver and the community of add ons can. Some of the sites people with no coding knowledge have built with RapidWeaver are staggering, and some are fully responsive too!
It would take a change of mindset from where you are to work with RapidWeaver rather than try to to treat it like something else, but you wouldnāt regret it if you did.
Thanks for your input. Still canāt make up my mind! Iām so used to being in control of designing a page! Hard to switch the mindset! It sounds lIke youāre right, if I can just wrap my brain around it!
MJ
Absolutely. Although each theme has different options that can be changed - some more than others - you can usually customise a theme to get what you want.
Then there are āblankā themes like Freestack and Foundation which allow you design a site from the ground up, however you choose.
If you can extract the content from your (existing) site, just the text and images, it shouldnāt be too difficult to drop it into RW. As Rob says, try the demo. You may be surprised by the extent to which you can customize appearance - all, effectively, by changes to the CSS, which is what underlies RWās Themes.
Itās also possible to retain a fair amount of control over most aspects of your site; custom CSS and JavaScript (etc) routines can all be added.
One of RWās greatest strengths is the 1,000+ add ons which do most of the hard work for you while at the same time being very customizable
Depending on how you marked it up, you may be able to reuse a lot of the html. After all, <h2>, <p>, <em>, &, <strong>, etc. work just as well in RW as anywhere else, as long as you make sure that you have āignore formattingā set. Iāve transferred large chunks of websites this way.
if youāre used to being in control of the HTML ā then you might consider building your own theme ā the theme API is on GitHub and RW is, at its very core, super extensible in a bunch of different ways.
The surface of RW is designed to be very user friendly so that even a novice can build a quick site. But if youāre comfortable with HTML you can build your own theme. Or if you like frameworks you can use something like Foundation for Joe Workman to do some amazing things.
@mjkrech - since you seem to know what you want your site to look like, Iād highly suggest you check out two specific themes: FreeStack (and its sister theme FreeStack Responsive) and Foundation. Both are basically āblankā themes that allow unlimited control over the look and feel of your website. I donāt believe that there is a showcase of Foundation sites yet - but Blueball Design has showcases for the responsive and non-responsive themes. And, there are a lot of Foundation sites on the Rapidweaver showcase site.
As someone who built a lot of sites in Dreamweaver over the years, I felt a bit penned-in when I first started using Rapidweaver. But, with the advent of these themes - and with Stacks, I havenāt touched Dreamweaver in well over a year. For small to medium-sized sites, thereās no way Iād go back.