Look no further than our list of the best Mac apps available around the internet, from excellent productivity tools to social media apps, entertainment, and security software! Whatever you need. Shop online at Best Buy to find the best web design software options for Mac or Windows. Digital downloads and subscription software available.
With the right design software, you can create almost any print or web project imaginable. For print projects, you generally need word processing, page layout and graphics applications.For the web, some of those same programs work, but there's also specialized web design software as well. Shop online at Best Buy to find the best web design software options for Mac or Windows. Digital downloads and subscription software available. Expression Web is free graphic design software to download from Microsoft's website Platform: Windows If you're a Windows user, Microsoft has made its Expression Web 4.0 software free of charge.
Building a Website Has Never Been Easier
Getting your message out these days requires good helpings of Facebook and Twitter, with maybe a dash of Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr. But that's not enough: if you want an internet presence that truly represents you or your organization, you also need a website that sets you apart from the crowd. A real website, as opposed to a social media page, gives you complete control over design and content. This lends credibility to your business, organization, or personal brand. Facebook pages all look alike in terms of design, but on your own website, you can realize a brand image, offer products for sale, and integrate third-party web services.
It's never been easier to set up a professional-looking, design-forward website. Well-known DIY site building services such as Squarespace and Wix are constantly improving and adding new capabilities. Newer competitors, such as Simvoly, Strikingly, Ucraft, and uKit, are popping up all the time with their own clever twists on the process.
You Need a Website
First, let's discuss why you even need a webpage in this day of social media domination of the web. On a personal level, you wouldn't want to send prospective employers to your Facebook page, so a personal website makes more sense as an online, customized resume. Another reason worth considering, for both personal and business purposes, is that building your own site gives you endless design choices. You have total control over products and services you may sell and how they're delivered, too.
Further, having a real, dedicated site makes a business seem more authoritative and trustworthy than a Facebook or Tumblr presence can on its own (though you should certainly also consider those services as elements of your online presence). It's as much an opening ante in the business world as having a business card for your company.
Getting your own website used to require a lot of tech wizardry, including knowledge of servers, HTML, FTP, site registrars, and web hosting services. Thankfully, we now live in the age of easy online site builders. The services included here let you make a well-designed, mobile-friendly site with minimal technical knowledge. They can even take a small or sole-proprietor business to profitability with buy links, online stores, and other money-making options.
Larger businesses spend many thousands of dollars to get their custom-designed and programmed sites, but there's no need for smaller organizations and individuals to go to that kind of expense. For about $10 per month (or around $25 if you're selling products) and a few hours of your time, the services included here can help you create a unique, attractive website.
With all these services, you build everything yourself, starting with a template you choose from a (hopefully) wide, well-categorized selection. Most use simple drag-and-drop interfaces that let you include items such as social share buttons, photo galleries, blogs, and media players. Some even let you restrict viewing with a password and let you have people join up as members of your site (see the table).
Free Website Builders
Several of the services included here offer free options, too. If you choose that path, however, your site will include branding from the provider, which necessarily makes your site less impressive to savvy surfers—and shoppers. Free offerings vary greatly in the storage, bandwidth, and site options they allow, so read the small print to find out how much you get with each provider. Strikingly, Weebly, Wix, and WordPress.com are among the most generous with their free offerings, if that's the way you want to go.
Register Your Domain
Before you can start building your home on the web, you need an address for it. Most of the site builders here can register a unique domain for you, and all can give you a web address using the provider's domain, for example, yourname.sitebuilder.com. Some include a custom domain name with their plans, usually requiring a year's commitment. The services also let you use a domain you've acquired from a third-party registrar such as pairNIC, but you often must pay the site builder for that privilege.
Website Design Tools
All of the web services listed here have you start by choosing from a selection of templates for your site. The better ones, such as Duda, Gator, Squarespace, and Wix, use templates that automatically reformat your site for viewing on mobile devices. They also offer specifically targeted templates based on your site's purpose, such as for promoting a bakery's sales, getting gigs for a musician, or keeping wedding guests informed.
Once you've chosen a template for your site, you need to make it your own. Most site builders let you tweak the color scheme, fonts, and page layouts, as well as add new pages. A good site builder offers sub-templates for the most commonly used page types: About, Contact, Products, Galleries, FAQ, Blog, and so on.
Of course, you'll also want to add custom content to those pages. You do this by adding text areas, photos (see Photos and Galleries section below), buttons, and other widgets. The better site builders, such as Wix and Duda, offer a marketplace of third-party widgets, for things like forms, chat, reservations, and social feeds.
Some site builders, such as Squarespace, Strikingly, Virb, and uKit, restrict you to placing page objects in spots that won't make your site look garish, which can be an advantage if design isn't your forte. Other builders offer more freedom; if that's what you're looking for, check out Gator or Wix. Gator in particular strikes a good balance between design freedom and reponsive restrictions.
Instant Sites
Starting with Wix's ADI (artificial design intelligence) tool, some of the site builders now offer a tool that lets you enter social accounts and other personal or business info, and presto bingo, they get you a no-work website. Jimdo and Simvoly now offer similar if somewhat less ambitious tools. Wix's ADI even impressed a professional designer acquaintance of ours with results we saw in testing, mostly using images and information it scraped from her LinkedIn account.
Mobile Site Design
Website Design Software Mac
Best steam controller for mac. Any site builder that wants to call itself modern these days must be capable of producing sites that play well on mobile, and all of those listed here can do so to some extent. Some, such as Squarespace and Weebly, use strictly responsive-design approaches to create a mobile site from what you've built for the web.
Responsive design is a popular web design strategy used by some of these site builders. This approach reformats the same webpage content to fit different screens. But in terms of SEO (search engine optimization), the search engines only care about whether a site displays suitably on mobile screen sizes. Both Bing and Google have pages where you can enter your URL to see if your site plays on mobile acceptably.
The strict responsive approach of Simvoly, uKit, and Weeby means you get no control over the mobile-only view. Gator, Ucraft, and Wix, by contrast, offer a mobile site preview and let you make customizations that only apply to mobile viewing. For example, you may want a splash page to welcome mobile viewers, or you may want to leave out an element that doesn't work well on the smaller screens.
Best emulator for mac reddit. So now start with few one and best Android emulators (Android Virtual Machine). If you have Mac and want to use Android emulators, then go for that. Read Also:- Closing Words There are many other Best Android emulators (Android Virtual Machine), but we mentioned only a few of them. Because many peoples are get confused, and they start using one by one for finding the best one. We also talked about the best Android emulators for Mac.
Photos and Galleries
Let's face it, one of the things we like best about the web is looking at pictures. The site builders here all offer some degree of photo and gallery display. Some, like Gator, Squarespace, and Wix, also offer loads of stock photography for you to use. Some let you touch up images with editing tools such as cropping, brightness, and in some cases even Instagram-like filters. Others, such as Gator, Simvoly, Ucraft, and uKit offer no photo editing at all, aside from resizing and positioning.
Photo gallery options also vary widely. For example, Weebly offers a good selection of styles for your online galleries, while others like Duda and GoDaddy are more limited in visual options.
Making Money From Your Website
Of course, if you want to go all out for sales, you need to move up to a dedicated web shopping cart service like Shopify, but that's a step you might not be ready to take. Most of the services here offer some ability to sell items from your site, if only in the form of a PayPal button, but some don't offer that in free accounts.
More-advanced options found in some builders let you process credit card payments and add your own cart and checkout pages. The more-powerful site builders include product promotions, email marketing, and inventory and shipping tools. Some let you sell digital downloads, while others don't; see the table above to find out which do. Only a couple of these builders let you put ads on your site, though most of them allow some degree of custom HTML code insertion.
Social and Site Stats
All of the site builders included here let you put Facebook Like and Twitter Follow buttons on your pages, and some even let you display feeds from the social networks. Some give you help building a Facebook Page and tying it into your site design and updates. Many products offer some sort of SEO tool, but too often this is just a form on which you can enter meta tags. You're mostly left to wrestle with that black magic known as SEO for yourself. It's very important to submit and verify your site to the search engines, unless you don't want anyone to find it!
Most of the products here can tell you about your site traffic, though the amount of detail varies greatly among them, and it's often tied to premium account levels. For example, Weebly can not only show you page views and unique visitors for each day of the month, but also search terms used to get to the site, referring sites, and top-visited pages. Wix and uKit, at the other end, have nothing in the way of built-in site stats, instead requiring you to create your own Google Analytics account, and even that requires a paid account. Another drawback of that approach is that you can only see traffic from the preceding day and earlier; it's not up-to-the-minute, or even the hour.
The WordPress Question
WordPress is a big name when it comes to creating websites. But you should know that WordPress.com is not what most people are talking about when they mention WordPress. What most internet-savvy people mean by the term WordPress is the free, open-source blogging platform that comes from WordPress.org. Using this requires you to find your own website hosting service. The WordPress.org software is such a popular site-building platform that many web hosting services even offer managed WordPress hosting plans. WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a service that deploys and hosts that software for you, so you don't have to go out and find your own hosting service.
WordPress (either version) is a blog-focused content management system that accepts plug-ins and themes that extend its capabilities to what most of what the other products here offer, including commerce. In fact, WordPress.com uses plug-ins such as JetPack to provide many of its features. As a whole, WordPress (either .com or .org) is not as easy to use as the other options in this roundup, but if blogging and site transferability are of key importance and you don't mind digging into its weeds a bit, you should consider the platform—especially WordPress.org. Furthermore, the ability to use WordPress is a valuable skill, as some estimates say that WordPress powers 30 percent of the internet.
Note that we reviewed WordPress.com as a website builder, but its rating of three stars doesn't quite qualify it for inclusion in this roundup.
Moving to Another Site Builder
One downside of most of these services is that, should you someday want to move to another web host, you'll likely be out of luck because of the custom code they use to display your site. Only a few of the services here let you take your site to another web hosting service: The most complete example of this is Weebly, which lets you download the standard site server folders. Squarespace offers some transferability by letting you output your site in standard WordPress format. As you might expect, the same transferability holds for WordPress.com.
Website Building Support Options
Support among the services varies widely, from free WordPress.com account's only offering community support, to Jimdo's email-only service, to Wix's telephone-callback service—even for free accounts! Many of the site builders offer rich online support knowledge bases and FAQs, so there's a good chance you won't even need to contact the company. I test each service's support as part of the review process by asking about some less-common site-building procedures.
So Many Site Building Choices!
As you can see, there are quite a few factors to consider when choosing an easy online website builder. And you have a slew of provider choices—there are at least 20 more vendors than those included in this list. Hardly a week goes by when we don't get a pitch from a new one we've never heard of before. We've reviewed many of those, but they didn't make the cut, either because of outdated site designs, lack of site-building options, or inadequate ease-of-use. Some recent examples include 1&1 Ionos MyWebsite, PageCloud,Ucraft, and Yahoo Small Business Websites.
The selection below should be plenty to get you started. Read the blurbs and then click through to the linked reviews to find the one that best suits your needs. And don't hesitate to chime in below in the comments section to report your experience with a site builder or praise one that's not included. For more advice and alternatives to DIY website building, check out our primer, How to Create a Website.
Best Website Builders Featured in This Roundup:
Wix Review
MSRP: $4.08
Pros: Extremely intuitive site-building interface. Loads of site gadgets. Free site option. Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses. Good mobile-site-building tools. Rich web-store features. Excellent Support.Cons: No built-in statistics feature. Sites don't use responsive design in the strict sense. Bottom Line: Wix is the easiest and fullest-featured website builder around, and you can use it to create your own highly customized site for free.Read ReviewDuda Review
MSRP: $14.25
Pros: Clear interface. Strong mobile site building. Free site option. Social media integration. Powerful site-traffic analysis. Capable web store tools. Even free accounts can sell products online.Cons: No third-party widget store. No email newsletter integration. No ability to port site to another host.Bottom Line: Duda offers everything you need to easily build and host a rich, mobile-friendly, full-featured website, complete with commerce.Read ReviewGator Website Builder Review
MSRP: $4.99
Pros: Well-designed, clear interface. Attractive, modern site templates. Yearly plans include domain name and SSL certificate. Easy store setup with digital download selling. Good included site stats.Cons: No free plan. Lacks email marketing. No photo editing. Cannot schedule blog posts. Limited app store.Bottom Line: Gator, a new offering in the DIY website building space from established name HostGator, hits all the right notes and it won't break the bank. Free dictation software download.Read ReviewSquarespace Review
MSRP: $12.00
Pros: Beautiful, responsive designs that accommodate mobile screens. Deep selling capabilities, including digital downloads. Free SSL certificate. Good help and analytics tools.Cons: Less straightforward than competing site builders. Fewer and more restrictive templates than the competition. No free level. Lacks third-party widget marketplace. Little customization for mobile sites.Bottom Line: Squarespace lets you build a modern, beautiful, responsive website for desktop and mobile viewing, and it also offers the potential for full-scale commerce.Read ReviewGoDaddy GoCentral Review
MSRP: $5.99
Pros: Generous storage and bandwidth. Easy, clear interface. Good-looking sites for both desktop and mobile viewing.Cons: Limited layout and design customization. No photo editing. No built-in traffic reporting. Online store requires upgrade.Bottom Line: GoDaddy's new website builder is easy to use and delivers good-looking responsive-design sites, but it doesn't allow lots of tinkering with page design.Read ReviewWeebly Review
MSRP: $8.00
Pros: Intuitive interface. Attractive responsive-design themes. Full commerce options. Site stats included. Lets you download your site code as standard HTML/CSS. iPad site-editing app.Cons: Lacks reusable photo storage. Mobile sites not customizable. No interface-wide undo feature. Bottom Line: Weebly is an easy-to-use site builder with a free option. It lets you create and publish attractive, responsive-design sites, blogs, and online stores.Read ReviewStrikingly Review
MSRP: $8.00
Pros: Makes site-building simple. Preview full sample sites built in template. Good looking responsive designs for mobile and desktop.Cons: Fewer template choices and less customization than some competitors. Many standard features require premium paid account.Bottom Line: Strikingly lets you create a well-designed site with extreme ease, but it offers limited options for customization.Read ReviewuCoz uKit Review
MSRP: $4.00
Pros: Slick interface. Saves uploaded images for reuse. Good, easy blogging tool. Gamification features. Low monthly price.Cons: Restrictive site element positioning. Lacks mobile site customization. Zero image editing. No included site statistics.Bottom Line: This good-looking website builder from Russia offers most everything you could want to get a mobile-friendly, commerce-capable site online. Look elsewhere for built-in statistics and image editing, however. Read ReviewSimvoly Review
MSRP: $5.00
Pros: Clear, friendly drag-and-drop interface. Attractive, customizable, responsive-design site templates. Store functionality with digital download sales. Site stats included on dashboard. Cons: No photo editing tools. Cannot customize mobile sites. Lacks widget marketplace. No shipping service integrations.Bottom Line: Website builder Simvoly offers easy-to-use tools for creating good-looking, responsive-design sites with a respectable level of customizability. Read ReviewPageCloud Review
MSRP: $20.00
Pros: True drag-and-drop, WYWIWYG interface. Freedom in placement and sizing of site elements. Good mobile customization. Scheduled posting.Cons: Expensive. Sparse e-commerce tools. No image editing. No included stats or analytics. Blog tool lacks many standard options. Bottom Line: PageCloud is a website builder with a modern drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface that gives you lots of leeway in page design and solid mobile customization, but it lacks standard e-commerce, blogging, and analytics features.Read Review
Best Website Builders Featured in This Roundup:
Wix Review
MSRP: $4.08Pros: Extremely intuitive site-building interface. Loads of site gadgets. Free site option. Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses. Good mobile-site-building tools. Rich web-store features. Excellent Support.Cons: No built-in statistics feature. Sites don't use responsive design in the strict sense.Bottom Line: Wix is the easiest and fullest-featured website builder around, and you can use it to create your own highly customized site for free.Read ReviewDuda Review
MSRP: $14.25Pros: Clear interface. Strong mobile site building. Free site option. Social media integration. Powerful site-traffic analysis. Capable web store tools. Even free accounts can sell products online.Cons: No third-party widget store. No email newsletter integration. No ability to port site to another host.Bottom Line: Duda offers everything you need to easily build and host a rich, mobile-friendly, full-featured website, complete with commerce.Read ReviewGator Website Builder Review
MSRP: $4.99Pros: Well-designed, clear interface. Attractive, modern site templates. Yearly plans include domain name and SSL certificate. Easy store setup with digital download selling. Good included site stats.Cons: No free plan. Lacks email marketing. No photo editing. Cannot schedule blog posts. Limited app store.Bottom Line: Gator, a new offering in the DIY website building space from established name HostGator, hits all the right notes and it won't break the bank. Free dictation software download.Read ReviewSquarespace Review
MSRP: $12.00Pros: Beautiful, responsive designs that accommodate mobile screens. Deep selling capabilities, including digital downloads. Free SSL certificate. Good help and analytics tools.Cons: Less straightforward than competing site builders. Fewer and more restrictive templates than the competition. No free level. Lacks third-party widget marketplace. Little customization for mobile sites.Bottom Line: Squarespace lets you build a modern, beautiful, responsive website for desktop and mobile viewing, and it also offers the potential for full-scale commerce.Read ReviewGoDaddy GoCentral Review
MSRP: $5.99Pros: Generous storage and bandwidth. Easy, clear interface. Good-looking sites for both desktop and mobile viewing.Cons: Limited layout and design customization. No photo editing. No built-in traffic reporting. Online store requires upgrade.Bottom Line: GoDaddy's new website builder is easy to use and delivers good-looking responsive-design sites, but it doesn't allow lots of tinkering with page design.Read ReviewWeebly Review
MSRP: $8.00Pros: Intuitive interface. Attractive responsive-design themes. Full commerce options. Site stats included. Lets you download your site code as standard HTML/CSS. iPad site-editing app.Cons: Lacks reusable photo storage. Mobile sites not customizable. No interface-wide undo feature.Bottom Line: Weebly is an easy-to-use site builder with a free option. It lets you create and publish attractive, responsive-design sites, blogs, and online stores.Read ReviewStrikingly Review
MSRP: $8.00Pros: Makes site-building simple. Preview full sample sites built in template. Good looking responsive designs for mobile and desktop.Cons: Fewer template choices and less customization than some competitors. Many standard features require premium paid account.Bottom Line: Strikingly lets you create a well-designed site with extreme ease, but it offers limited options for customization.Read ReviewuCoz uKit Review
MSRP: $4.00Pros: Slick interface. Saves uploaded images for reuse. Good, easy blogging tool. Gamification features. Low monthly price.Cons: Restrictive site element positioning. Lacks mobile site customization. Zero image editing. No included site statistics.Bottom Line: This good-looking website builder from Russia offers most everything you could want to get a mobile-friendly, commerce-capable site online. Look elsewhere for built-in statistics and image editing, however.Read ReviewSimvoly Review
MSRP: $5.00Pros: Clear, friendly drag-and-drop interface. Attractive, customizable, responsive-design site templates. Store functionality with digital download sales. Site stats included on dashboard.Cons: No photo editing tools. Cannot customize mobile sites. Lacks widget marketplace. No shipping service integrations.Bottom Line: Website builder Simvoly offers easy-to-use tools for creating good-looking, responsive-design sites with a respectable level of customizability.Read ReviewPageCloud Review
MSRP: $20.00Pros: True drag-and-drop, WYWIWYG interface. Freedom in placement and sizing of site elements. Good mobile customization. Scheduled posting.Cons: Expensive. Sparse e-commerce tools. No image editing. No included stats or analytics. Blog tool lacks many standard options.Bottom Line: PageCloud is a website builder with a modern drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG interface that gives you lots of leeway in page design and solid mobile customization, but it lacks standard e-commerce, blogging, and analytics features.Read Review
Today's Best Tech Deals
Picked by Macworld's Editors
Top Deals On Great Products
Picked by Techconnect's Editors
Softpress Systems Freeway Express 6
Read Macworld's reviewRiver SRL Sparkle
Read Macworld's reviewKarelia Software Sandvox 2
Read Macworld's reviewRealmac Software RapidWeaver 6
Read Macworld's reviewMacaw 1.5
Read Macworld's reviewRage Software EverWeb 1.8.2
Read Macworld's reviewCazoobi Blocs 1.3
Read Macworld's review
A crowded slate of Mac apps aim to make building a full-featured, modern website drag-and-drop simple. Many even support one of the most crucial new web trends: responsive design, which can automatically switch up your layout to look good on a widescreen monitor, a tiny smartphone, or anything in between.
While no single program currently offers all the power, flexibility, and simplicity I’d hoped for, I did find two particularly strong contenders that at least came within shouting distance of that ideal.
Top choice for complete beginners: Blocs
If you have no idea how to start building a site, start with Blocs (). At $70, it’s $10 cheaper than most of the other programs in this roundup. And thanks to its extensive library of well-crafted chunks of code, it makes assembling an impressively slick site almost as simple as snapping together a pile of Lego blocks.
Even before you begin, Blocs has done the hard work for you, building snippets of sample code that you can mix, match, customize, and stack. Just pick a clearly color-coded section of your design—header, body, or footer—and choose a chunk of layout to add, whether it’s a fancy screen-filling photo, a few columns of text, or a swath of smaller icons or images. Once it’s in place, you can tweak the template to suit your needs. At every turn, Blocs tries to sweat the small stuff so you don’t have to, including a navigation menu that’ll automatically update as you add new pages to your site.
Spartan but clear thumbnails help you choose which chunk to add next, and accurately represent what you’re getting. While you’re limited largely to that ready-made collection, Blocs offers a wide enough selection of appealing elements to build an appealing site. And since all the code’s prebuilt, every site you make in Blocs has responsive design support baked in, without any extra effort on your part. The sample site I built looked great on big and small computer screens, good on my iPad, and decent enough on my iPhone 5S.
Blocs’ balance between a sparse selection and effective results also applies to its feature set, including a limited but appealing roster of fonts, and its extremely basic control over text styling and padding. That deliberate simplicity helps keep new users from getting overwhelmed, and further flattens out the already gentle learning curve.
Blocs’ stark, dark design departs from Mac conventions, and some aspects take a little time to learn. Instead of bringing up contextual menus, right-clicking brings up a palette of individual page elements you can add to the existing code. Placing objects on the page can occasionally feel a tad squirrely, though it’s easy to undo mistakes or move a misplaced item.
Blocs is a work in progress, and its creator’s laid out an ambitious, intriguing slate of potential upgrades. For now, Blocs sets modest goals, but carries them out impressively well.
Top choice for everyone else: EverWeb
If you know just enough HTML and CSS to get yourself in trouble, trust EverWeb () to keep you out of it. It’s more flexible and freeform than Blocs’ do-it-for-me simplicity, and it’s full of thoughtful tricks to help users get around the program’s own limitations.
When creating a site, you can choose from an extensive slate of great-looking, up-to-date templates, or start from scratch. Like Pages, EverWeb lets you draw text and image boxes or other shapes directly onto your page, then position and style them as you wish. I liked the program’s clean design and well-crafted interface. It lacks a grid or guides to keep your page tidy, but EverWeb will automatically or manually align elements by their edges or centers. The layout engine sometimes had trouble accurately aligning full-width elements, but otherwise proved fun and responsive.
EverWeb offers more options for CSS styling than Blocs; it won’t give you precise control of every element, but it provides enough choices to make a nice-looking site. Top-notch prebuilt widgets, including image sliders, image galleries, navigation menus, and more, are easy to edit and customize, and they yield great results. I was particularly impressed with the PayPal widget, which lets you build a full-featured online store with minimal time and effort—an ability most rivals either don’t offer or charge extra for.
Rather than supporting responsive design, EverWeb provides mobile versions of many templates, and builds in an easy way to redirect mobile users to those pages from their desktop counterparts. That solution gobbles extra server space and bandwidth, but can also be less hassle than trying to reconfigure the same design to fit different-sized screens. Other clever workarounds let you expand EverWeb’s font roster with your own picks, a feature found in too few of its competitors.
The code EverWeb produced was somewhat messy in the version I tested, though by the time you read this, an update promising sleeker results may be available. Still, I enjoyed EverWeb’s terrific balance between friendly design and a robust feature set.
Top contenders
Macaw
Macaw () talks a big game but doesn’t entirely deliver. Aimed at high-end pros, it offers more power and flexibility than any other program here. However, it’s also the most intimidating and frustrating app of the bunch, in part because it feels only half-finished.
Macaw excels at its finer points. You can tweak nearly every CSS style attribute via well-designed palettes, and build custom style classes to apply to any element on your page. Smart scripting support lets you drag in existing variables and color swatches as you write your code. And only Macaw offers pixel-precise control over responsive design, letting you set breakpoints at multiple screen widths, then rearrange your design to best fit each one.
But while it gets the little things right, Macaw seems to struggle with the big ones. I found layout exasperating, as if the program were always fighting me. The help files are sometimes confusing and often incomplete—bad news for a program as dense as this one. You can only add to its limited list of fonts by paying for a subscription to Adobe Typekit. And rather than focusing on fixing these gaps in the existing version, Macaw’s creators seem instead to be working on its new sibling, Macaw Scarlet, which promises even more sophisticated features.
RapidWeaver
If you just want to pour your content into a limited set of sharp-looking templates, with responsive design already built in, RapidWeaver () will work great. This powerfully extensible program can do far more than that, too‑but you’ll have to pay a good deal extra to unlock its full potential.
RapidWeaver’s by far the best choice here for building a blog or a podcast, with excellent, easy support for adding new entries and episodes. But I didn’t like how it forced me to flip back and forth between the raw content on my pages and a full preview of how they’d look online.
If you want to branch out beyond its small slate of templates, keep your wallet handy. The app’s online market of powerful plugins offers tons of new capabilities and professionally designed themes. But their considerable cost could quickly add up to more than you paid for RapidWeaver itself.
The rest of the pack
Sandvox
Sandvox () loses points for its limited customization and big but outdated selection of designs. However, it’s delightfully easy to use, including a super-simple integrated hosting service that seems fairly priced for what it offers. And changing the whole look of your site is as easy as choosing a new template. I think Sandvox would make a great choice for teachers and students, or for parents who want to help their kids build a fun, basic site.
Sparkle
Sparkle () is a perfectly respectable app that unfortunately gets outshined by EverWeb, which feels like Sparkle’s very similar-looking but ultimately superior cousin. I give Sparkle kudos for at least trying to make it easy to add third-party web fonts, even if the execution’s a little clunky. Its preset page sizes for responsive design also work better in concept than reality. Sparkle could become a real gem, but it needs more polish first.
Freeway Express
Living up to its name, Freeway Express () is free. And if you endure its labyrinthine help files, you can build some nifty things relatively quickly. But its cluttered interface can prove frustrating, and it renders pages with such sorely outdated techniques—years behind every other app here–that you’re probably better off avoiding it. A paid pro version offers a much more power and sophistication, but also costs a whopping $150.
Bottom line
Text editors are cheap or free, as are resources to teach yourself HTML, CSS, and jQuery—all more intuitive than they sound, even for non-geniuses. But that education demands dedication, time, and persistence, especially since today’s cutting-edge code quickly becomes tomorrow’s cobweb-covered embarrassment.
If you’d rather opt out of that Red Queen’s race, you’ll at least have a few good choices, whether you pick Blocs’ sleek simplicity or EverWeb’s user-friendly flexibility. I suspect Mac users will have even better, more complete options for building websites in a year or two. But for now, those two are the best of the bunch.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.
Softpress Systems Freeway Express 6
Read Macworld's reviewRiver SRL Sparkle
Read Macworld's reviewKarelia Software Sandvox 2
Read Macworld's reviewRealmac Software RapidWeaver 6
Read Macworld's reviewMacaw 1.5
Read Macworld's reviewRage Software EverWeb 1.8.2
Read Macworld's reviewCazoobi Blocs 1.3
Read Macworld's review