please help a frustrated person

[Mitou]

I have used iweb for so long and I like it, I am even pretty good with it but it is sometimes time to move on.
I want to learn something not as stilted but when I tried Rapidweaver I can't make it do anything I want. I feel locked in the templates, then I tried freeway and there the same thing happens, what I can do in two minutes in iweb is taking me forever and it does not look like I want.
Rapidweaver is not very expensive but to get it to do things it seems like you will have to buy all sorts of plugins.
I need advice. What should I invest all this learning time in? Is it worth it?
Any advice will be considered carefully.
Thanks

 

[angelwatt]

Well, how long it takes to do something with any piece of software, will depend on how well you know the program. There's always going to be a learning curve, and switching to do the same type of things a different way, it'll feel odd. That's why I hate iWeb. I'm a hand coder so using something like iWeb just feels so wrong and frustrates me, but I know some people have done some spectacular things with it because they took the time to get to know the program and work around some of its limitations.

So, you should make your decisions based on some long-term thoughts. How much web design do you want to learn (understand all the tags and validation, or just some basics)? One program I'll recommend, which is free so no reason not to give it a look, is Kompozer. It's one of the very few WYSIWYG HTML editors, and does a decent job. It even gives you a GUI to creating the CSS for the page. It has it's own limitations and lack of control of certain things, but you can go to code view and tweak things by hand when need be. The program does essentially an assumption that you knows the tags and how to use them though, but that makes it a nice tool to learn code. Just a note though, Kompozer isn't in development anymore, so don't expect any updates to it. Not sure why development stopped though, it showed a lot of promise.

If you learn all the coding and practice, what you can currently do in a couple minutes in iWeb, you'll be able to do in a text editor in about the same amount of time.

Just my thoughts for you.

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

@OP:

What, for your, defines "time to move on" as you said?

If it involves going to the next step beyond iWeb, which is being able to hand code, integrate server side code and database, and have more flexibility in adding custom scripting and theme control --- it will take time to learn your way around a product offering such features as angelwatt astutely noted.

But you need to understand as well that by introducing more capabilities, there are more decision trees and thus (it seems, compared to iWeb) more steps involved to get from point A to point B. By decision trees I mean in iWeb if you insert a link to a document, it'll actually hyperlink it for you and even auto publish it to the server. But actually in web development there are choices, such as streaming the file based on MIME type, maybe loading it from a database instead, or creating a script that handles all your downloads and includes a hit counter as well via database. Well, that means more "stuff" in the IDE menus, a few more steps sometimes to get things done, considering the possibilities are expanded now (professional development).

But as you advance in skill, you'll see RapidWeaver has thought most of this out very well, making such tools easily accessible to you - even if you don't use all the tools all the time. Meaning, you'll look back and realize the new way is better.

This is just an example, one of many, to get the point across. IT IS WORTH IT.

Relax, learn, in time you'll appreciate the features - and actually want more. As to paying for plugins, you'll experience that in alot of shareware software, even Adobe Dreamweaver has pay to play plugins along with their open source community. If you search the Net you'll find numerous free themes and a few plugins for RW, but like anything else in life - all the best quality stuff that's easiest to use and powerful all at the same time are not free, developers worked very hard and should be compensated. Or use RW to do it yourself once you're more familiar with the tools.

-jim

 

[Mitou]

Thank you Jim for the encouragement. I have decided to hang in there and go with rapidweaver. I am reading a lot of info, and watching a few videos and I can see that it is worth it. I will not have the site I want right away and maybe not even soon but I'll get there. I am also moving my new site away from the apple servers as they do not offer functionalities other servers offer.
Thanks again everyone who helped me in this decision.