You know, I actually did give Rapidweaver a go, and checked out a lot of the sites that had been produced under it. To me, it had too much of a Web 2.0/bubbly theme about it. I might be wrong, and it's probably due to my n00biness, but the pages I started to make already started to look like a blog and not a company website.
Not that I mind that style, but for what I want to do I need it to look plain, simple, and luxurious, like Louis Vuitton's website (without all the animations and flash) or the ones I linked above. Right now I need to showcase about 8 collections, 6 colors per style, and I don't expect to add on more than 3 or 4 per year.
Thanks again for the suggestions so far.
One quick question -- would I be likely starting from a theme (so I wouldn't have to make my own buttons and etc.)? Where would I look for more themes?
Hi, I emailed you as well... I don't want to get flagged for spamming, but I am not in any way, so I will post here first.
Yes, there is a lot of web 2.0 bubblyness going on, and RW is not immune from the style trend. Some of the themes do have a bloggy feel about theme, but most themes have an assortment of page types (styled text, blog, multimedia, image gallery, flickr galleries, file sharing pages, form pages that work pretty much off the shelf with PHP... if your host supports PHP, etc. The nice thing is you do not have to build your own navigation from scratch, it is built from the CSS code that comes with the themes. That is why I say choose your theme based more on nav structure than the appearance. Most themes have fully flushed out variations (which offer maybe 4-8 different color schemes with a click of a few buttons), but you can also create your own modified theme and use that on a global basis. For example this is a working site I am building using Elixirs Elements theme (the site is almost all dummy pics & text as it is being built now). The link is southjerseystingrays.com, and the theme link is here:
http://www.elixirgraphics.com/themes/elements/index.html...
Most theme developers offer preview sites of their themes that give you an idea of the pages and theme styles that are in the can.
If you want a flexible site you can make your own (easily) choose a "pro" level theme as they are the ones that offer the most control over the look and feel without having to muck about in the css & html code. However it is not difficult to do so with any text editor (I use TextMate & CSSedit2). Despite the clickable interface for making changes you will learn a bit about CSS & Javascript along the way (I never would have learned on my own from scratch... NEVER, lol). I knew CSS was the way, but it was too daunting to start with a blank page.
If you want to see what CSS can do check out
www.csstux.com or
http://rapidweaved.com/showcase/index.php (yes, many sites are a mite bubbly, lol), but many sites were created using RW. I suspect there are quite a few professionals using RW as their dirty little secret (you can hide the fact a site was created using RW, or at least mostly to the casual observer). The ease and speed that big sites can be built with is pretty amazing. It is not Ruby on Rails, or any of the other complicated cool options... but there are quite a few PROFESSIONAL companies using RW to build their own sites, and their are also quite a few professional web guys using it as well. CSSedit is amazing, but I couldn't build a site with it right away... with RW I was out of the box and running.
Good theme developers:
JoshLockhart.com
elixirgraphics.com
rapid-ideas.com
seydesign.com
OH, and the pages are Google Analytics friendly... you can post the code snippet in 1 spot and it will appear on every page. GA is awesome, not to mention free. Want to embed Google live maps on your page? Easy, I learned how in less than an hour.
Here is another site I am building using the Silk4 theme from Josh Lockhart (again much of the text is dummied in).
http://red.oakdns.net/~njsouthern/
Hopefully this will give you something to think about. I suspect that a lot of folks may be hesitant to recommend RW as it it not a "pro" tool, or they may suggest it is more manly to create your code line by line, lol. Rubbish, before the advent of mac based publishing I was a magazine art director who knew line-based typesetting code... I have NO desire to go back to those days for purity sake. If you have questions you can site mail me...
regards,
michael