RapidWeaver for Mac is a powerful and easy to use web design app that puts you back in control. Build your own beautiful, responsive, websites without having. Top Best Website development apps for iPhone and iPad: iOS Tools Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) Till Today’s for all Website developer and Designer’s god gift is the Stack Exchange, For all types of solution who are finding from expert over the world. Download and install the best free apps for Web Development Software on Mac from CNET Download.com, your trusted source for the top software picks.
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 ( ). 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: A few quick clicks let you drop in predesigned, customizable chunks of your new webpage. 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 ( ) 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. While it doesn’t offer precise CSS styling, EverWeb’s options are still good enough to make a slick, modern-looking site. 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 ( ) 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.
Best Software For Website Development
RapidWeaver If you just want to pour your content into a limited set of sharp-looking templates, with responsive design already built in, ( ) 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 ( ) 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 ( ) 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, ( ) 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.
Anyone with a text editor, a good grasp of, and enough time on their hands can create a beautiful website. But what if you don't have time to brush up on your coding skills? What if squinting at a page full of code makes your head hurt? Or what if you're, you know, lazy? A bumper crop of Mac apps has sprung up to help people in just such a predicament, applying a friendly front end and familiar tools to the ever-more-complicated word of web coding.
While none of the three polished apps we review here will be perfect for everyone, chances are that one of them has the right feature set to fit your needs. TurboWeb. Unique among this lineup, TurboWeb boasts a huge, searchable library of royalty-free stock photos — a big help for zero-budget designers who want to spice up an otherwise text-heavy site.
I also enjoyed TurboWeb's instant access to my personal Pictures folder and iPhoto or Photos library. That said, you can't search through those libraries from within TurboWeb, so if you've got a pile of pictures on your hard drive, be prepared to do a lot of scrolling until you find the one you want. I also found it odd that I couldn't use any of the program's stock photos in its photo-carousel widget. On the whole, TurboWeb does most of what you'd want it to perfectly adequately, including a bare-bones but functional way to upload your site to the FTP server of your choice (or sign up for TurboWeb's own recommended hosting provider). The online help files are simple but sufficient as well. Nonetheless, TurboWeb fell short in a few key areas. I couldn't get text to wrap around an image for the life of me.
I couldn't create a button with different active, hover, or default states. TurboWeb's short list of font options can't be changed or expanded.
Responsive design support — allowing you to display the same pages differently on devices with different-sized screens — was rudimentary at best; you can swap between desktop and tablet versions, but if you've finished creating one layout, you'll have to start all over from a blank page to create the other. And TurboWeb's ability to edit and apply custom classes is rudimentary at best.
It applies only to text — not images, buttons, or anything else — and offers no control over margins or padding. $19.99 - EverWeb. Like TurboWeb, EverWeb offers a similar drag-and-drop interface (albeit without the handy grid or guides) and overall feature set, with the same limitations when it comes to customizing CSS style elements on your pages. And it shares TurboWeb's somewhat clunky approach to 'responsive design,' requiring you to create a whole separate set of mobile counterpart pages to those on your desktop site.
It lacks TurboWeb's sizable stock image library, but makes up for it by automatically supporting any of Google's extensive library of free fonts, once you've downloaded and installed them on your Mac. So why should you even consider shelling out $60 more than TurboWeb for EverWeb? First, EverWeb boasts outstanding help files, including an extensive and well-written manual running more than 100 pages, along with available right from the app's opening screen.
Second, EverWeb's publishing tools are somewhat more robust, with more options for FTP server info, and the ability to add custom header/footer code and even a favicon for your site. And finally — and perhaps most importantly, if you need it — EverWeb builds in the ability to set up a basic online store, including buy buttons and a shopping cart, using PayPal. Few other web design apps offer anything like this — neither TurboWeb nor Blocs do — and those that do often charge extra for the privilege. With the few exceptions I've noted, like TurboWeb's searchable stock photo database, EverWeb does basically everything that TurboWeb does, but just a little bit better.
However, unless you want to set up your own online store quickly, easily, and inexpensively, EverWeb may not be better enough to merit paying four times TurboWeb's price. Free, $79.99 after trial - Blocs. Packed with powerful but friendly features, and getting better all the time, Blocs is the app I wish I'd had back when I built sites for a living. Rather than making you build a site from scratch, Blocs offers prebuilt page elements that you can quickly stack atop each other. Once you've roughed out the overall look of your page, it's easy to customize its content and fine-tune its appearance.
Switching into 'drop mode' brings up a searchable palette of individual elements — buttons, headers, etc. — that you can place within the prebuilt frameworks to further tweak them to your liking. Blocs boasts powerful control over CSS styles, including the ability to create custom classes and apply them to any element in your site. Tweak the custom class once — change the color from maroon to gold, for instance — and the change ripples through every element with that class, site-wide. And Blocs offers pinpoint precision over nearly every CSS style parameter you can think of, all in a clean, coherent interface. Blocs' support for responsive design also leaves competitors eating its dust. Design a page for the desktop, and with one click you can see what it'll look like on tablets or phones, too.
You can change elements of the design to improve its readability in one view without affecting how it'll look in the others. And you can even change or create custom classes specifically for phone or tablet pages as well. It's only fair to note that the sized-down versions of these pages don't always render on the actual devices exactly as they look in Blocs, but they tend to be close enough to fix with a little extra tweaking. Blocs also supports a few fancy bells and whistles such as video backgrounds. Adding Google web fonts to Blocs' menu is as easy as pasting in the right URL. And it's the only program in this lineup to include support for several popular free or paid content management systems, including October and Pulse. Blocs's excellent help files and video tutorials can show you how to quickly set up a Blocs page as a front end for database-driven content in these systems, among many other useful tips and tricks.
Blocs isn't perfect. It's the work of a single programmer, so you'll find a few hiccups, twitches, and glitches here and there. Its prebuilt components mean you won't be able to indulge your wildest flights of design fancy.
And the earnest 'helpful hint' blurbs that pop up whenever you try something new in the program quickly start to feel a little too much like Microsoft's notorious Clippy. But on the whole, it's my favorite app in this roundup by far. Free, $79.99 and up for licenses - Which app is best? If you just want an inexpensive way to build nice-looking, no-frills sites, TurboWeb's a solid bet. If you need to set up an online store without paying through the nose, consider EverWeb.
But if you want to get the most bang for your buck, you can't beat Blocs. If we've overlooked one of your favorite apps for web design — or if you just want to gripe about how text editors are the only way to build sites — please let us know in the comments below. This post may contain affiliate links. See our for more details.