Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi,

Just wanted to get some tips for developing a website on the Mac.

1. iWeb (I have iWeb that came with iLife `06) seems interesting enough. But
is there a place where some more professional looking templates can be
downloaded or bought?

2. What are the good alternatives to iWeb, that have good professional
templates? Is RapidWeaver the choice here?

Thanks.

hi joel!
i alsouse a mac and looked at a lot of options that were cost effective!
Adobe certainly offers some amazing software but the learning curve is
quite high as well as the price! Rapidweaver was good but seemed more
geared toward the consumerand not the business website market. I
finally decided on Freeway Express by Softpress and so far i love it!!


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Does it have to be on your mac?

There are thousands and thousands of templates out there on the web ...

There are several thousand Joomla templates to choose from. Joomla works just fine for macs. *shrug*

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Accounting Made Simple | Sole Proprietor Tax Guide

Yes, templates for Joomla, TypePad, WordPress, just sites in general ... many many to choose from!

HTML is not platform-specific. And you can run anything on a Mac for testing purposes thanks to MAMP.

Hi Nikole,

Well, it has to be a Mac because that is the only machine I have at the
moment

And I hear there are great tools, beyond iWeb, to make a website.

All, thanks for the links to the templates.

I use a mac with all of these things ... that`s what I`m saying. I don`t know about your tools, because I use TextWrangler from BB Edit. But the internet is platform-independent so you can load a template from anywhere.

It is not about which computer platform to use, it is about which "language" to use.

There are many ways to build a website. You can use plain old HTML. You can use a packaget (like iWeb) to build the HTML.

However, if e-commerce is a serious part of your future plan, you will need database and programming - a common approach is to use open source OSCommerce (with uses PHP and MySQL). You may also consider MSSQL + .NET.

You need to decide your business need first, then decide on the server platform (whether iWeb/.Mac,  LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, or Windows + IIS + .NET + MSSQL), then decide on which platform to develop on.

 

"You need to decide your business need first, then decide on the server
platform (whether iWeb/.Mac, LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, or
Windows + IIS + .NET + MSSQL), then decide on which platform to
develop on."

I agree completely with johnqh, although I would suggest sticking to
LAMP, or go the Ruby on Rails route. There are also lots more developers
familiar with those languages to help you out. There`s not much ASP has
to offer and its proprietary technology so it may even cost more.

Here`s how I build sites on my Mac (may be slightly more advanced that
what you`re looking for):

1) Create design in Photoshop and slice it up
2) Create XHTML template with TextMate (www.macromates.com)
3) Re-create design with CSS in TextMate
4) Test with MAMP (www.mamp.info) with virtual hosts. This allows you to
view your site at http://test.site for example.

See this article for how to enable virtual hosts on your Mac
(www.evolt.org/article/Enabling_Virtual_Hosts_on_MacOS_X/18/ 13138/).
Remember to change the httpd.conf for MAMP
(not OSX) if you`re using MAMP.

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--
David Wang
Chief WordPress Wrangler @ ClickWP

I think the original poster in this thread was just looking for some simple HTML...