RapidWeaver is intended to create responsive websites with little effort on your part. In this respect, its WYSIWYG editor lets you work on your website just as you edit a standard document, without ever needing to write a single line of code.
As said, one of the advantages of RapidWeaver is that it allows creating responsive websites. This means that the resulting pages can be made to look exactly as planned on many different devices. In this respect, there is a device simulator that lets you preview your pages as they would appear on different models of iPhone, iPad and MacBook. Although the set of supported devices seems quite limited, it is also possible to change other screen sizes for custom devices.
In addition to themes, RapidWeaver has built-in templates for pages. This way, you can easily create photo albums, blogs, sitemaps and contact forms without much effort. Luckily, you can instantly see how your site would look like with different themes. Although this product is advertised as not needing to write a single line of code, the application does let you edit the code behind the pages directly. For this purpose, you can quickly switch from WYSIWYG to code view.
RapidWeaver allows working on your site in both online and offline modes. In this respect, it even allows local PHP rendering. Fortunately, you can create your website and save it to a local directory without worrying about publishing since the app has a built-in FTP client to do that.
Another advantage of RapidWeaver is related to its producing code that is perfectly optimized for search engines. Similarly, it is also very convenient that the app allows tracking website statistics.
All in all, RapidWeaver is perfect for those who would like to create beautiful responsive websites effortlessly. Good news is that you can expand its features by installing add-ons, and there are more than 100 of them. However, there has been a lot of criticism that some third-party add-ons, such as Stacks, without which RapidWeaver would be extremely crippled, are only available via extra payment. Luckily, the product can be tried at no cost.
Pros
- Works offline
- Supports PHP
- WYSIWYG editor
- Plenty of help materials
- Supports add-ons
- SEO code
- Built-in FTP client
Cons
- Limited number of device presets
- Some paid add-ons are required for the product to work as expected
Makes building websites fun!
Mac Informer currently reports this as 5.31 when the ACTUAL version is 5.3.1The demo version is currently (2013-11-03) downloaded as rapidweaver_531.zip which can be used indefinitely for *FREE* with a 3 page limit, this is available for download from the authors website.