Sandvox Sites

I needed to redo my professional website quickly and have it look good. I had beta-tested Sandvox and gotten a free copy in thanks, so rather than hand-coding yet another site for myself, I put it together in Sandvox in a fraction of the time (and it probably looks better, too, even though I'm a good designer).

I was probably surfing MacWord or MacNN and saw a notice for a beta-testers for a new Mac web development program. Signed up for the first public beta and worked with it through the beta process to release. Saw a lot of growth in that time and since its initial release.

I build websites as part of my business. I hand-code, use Dreamweaver, and even own Rapidweaver though I've never used it because Sandvox is so much better in so many significant ways.

I use Sandvox for sites when a client needs a site quickly, when I'm doing sites pro bono, or if someone wants a nice-looking site but doesn't have a lot of money to pay me to develop by hand.

Being able to get in and edit the CSS fairly easily makes it easy to make even the templates unique for different customers. While I still do sites by hand or use Dreamweaver when the occassion demands it, Sandvox's combination of ease-of-use, large variety of templates, growing developer community, ability to inject HTML or create Raw HTML pages, and many other features make it an increasingly important piece of my web development tool kit.

While the interface takes a little getting used to, it was clearly designed from scratch, not as a variation on a theme. The live preview as you work makes Rapidweaver seem archaic by comparison. I think that's why I can't use RW: the inability to see how my page looks as I add features in RW just seems silly considering how easy it is in Sandvox.

Being able to do Raw HTML pages or inject code into certain parts of the page really vaults it from a consumer program to one that professionals can use. I have several sites in Sandvox that use PHP and even MySQL/PHP, with the raw code just pasted into a Sandvox page so that the design remains. It's not prefect, but it's pretty great.

The designs are also nice and different. While I will never use many of them, there's enough variety that I've been able to use several without any alteration to create really nice looking sites, in some cases that integrate existing content with a seamless look.

The ability for a designer to export a site and then mess with the CSS, or copy a design and alter to CSS to create a psuedo-new design is also a nice feature from a design/development standpoint. Doing that has also helped teach me more about CSS because the code is well commented and clear, so thanks for that. :)

Overall it's a great combination of power, good looks, and ease of use.