As part of my work, I have looked at various ways to do Web templates. Here is the overview of some and my observations:
RapidWeaver
RapidWeaver has been around for a long time. It’s Mac only and not a bad tool overall. We use it for some of our internal pages that we had to put up quickly. It certainly has some oddities but is overall pretty nice. It comes with a decent number of templates but most of them are uninspired. But at least it’s not very bloated and the HTML is overall fairly clean and works (for the most part) in IE 6. Its templates can be modified with a little effort and new ones created from them. It creates some odd URL structures with its folders though.
Sandvox
Boy is Karelia unlucky. Anyone remember Watson and how Apple came after them with Sherlock? Well, it happened again with Sandvox. Overall it’s a nice tool. Probably the easiest to use of the bunch. I don’t remember how hard the templates were to modify, but it wasn’t as flexible as RapidWeaver for what we wanted, so we had to pass.
Apple iWeb ‘09
Apple’s iWeb is the prettiest of the software tools and has some gorgeous templates. It’s also really flexible in positioning and darn easy to use. Those are the good points. However, templates are limited. If you want to modify them or create new ones, be warned. It’s about as difficult as it gets – down to editing .plist files. It has nice plugins but the add some horrible JavaScript all over your site. The sites also choke a lot in IE 6 (sadly still a popular browser).
Artisteer
Artisteer is a fascinating piece of software. A Windows application that lets you create Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal templates. We use Drupal extensively, so we wanted to give it a try. It’s fairly powerful and allows you to quickly build some pretty fancy designs. However, the code is sometimes a bit bloated (to be expected from an automated tool) and we had some issues with IE 6. As of the day of this post, the design of one of our sites, Ataxi.ro, was inspired by an Artisteer template.
RV Sitebuilder
It’s a f****** piece of ****. A relic of old times, I have nothing good to say about it. Difficult to use, ugly templates, horrid results. Use at your own risk. Of course, that’s just my opinion.
Dream Template
We tried a lot of their templates and were not happy with them. Most templates are completely table based, no <div> to be found. Small modifications break the table layout; flash templates often don’t come with the sources, so they cannot be changed: you can just change the html pages the flash menus point to. Overall we were not satisfied.
Template World
We liked this site better than Dream Template. They still have a lot of table based template, but also a good number of <div>-based ones as well. Flash templates come with sources, so they can be modified fairly well. Still not ideal but the best we found so far for the limited amount of money.
