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Site Building
After Emily entered the content for her main page, we created a photo album page for her pets, and she came up with the idea of creating a quiz page, in which she’d ask questions to see which of her friends (or her) the quiz-taker was most similar to. Luckily, the Contact Form page preset adapted quite well to an e-mail quiz form that Emily can review and personally respond to. We adapted some of the fields to ask people their favorite foods, activities and so on, and provided some options in a pop-up menu for each question. Adding new questions and new menu items was done with one click of the plus sign (+) below each section, as shown in Figure 4. Some extra form presets would be a welcome addition, especially one for creating an automatically scored quiz, although that might be a bit much to ask, considering the $34.95 purchase price of RapidWeaver. I also had an error with the quiz form we created, but a quick search of RapidWeaver’s support forums explained that it was actually due to the version of PHP we have installed on our server, not a problem with RapidWeaver itself.
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Figure 4 Creating a quiz form
Next, I added some images to the Pets page. This step was especially fun and straightforward. I simply went into iPhoto, created an album called Pets, dragged some pictures from the digital camera into it, and then opened the album from within RapidWeaver. Selecting and deselecting the checkboxes next to pictures determined whether the photo would be included in the photo album.
Next, we added some captions to the photos, shown in Figure 5, and clicked the Setup button to set the size of each image and the number of thumbnails per row. Speaking of photos, you can drag and drop them from iPhoto onto your Web page and then use the Media Inspector—found under the Window menu—to resize, rotate, and tag the image. Image resizing and rotation is shown in real time, which makes editing fun and easy, with no Photoshop required.
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Figure 5 Creating a pets photo album
Finally, I added a few more pages to the site to finish it off. With every new page added, RapidWeaver added the necessary menu links and cookie crumbs to the rest of the site. Selecting Inspector from the Window menu brings up the Page/Site Inspector dialog box, with Page Inspector active by default. Here you can change the page’s name as it will appear in the menu, choose in which folder the page resides, and give the page a descriptive file name. You can even hide a page so it doesn’t appear in the menu and select whether it opens in a new browser window. Clicking Site, as shown in Figure 6, switches to the Site Inspector, allowing you to change a page’s title, slogan, copyright, and contact information. It’s also possible to select a custom logo for the site and choose a favicon to appear in the address bar.
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Figure 6 Site Inspector
After Emily was happy with her Web site, I uploaded it, as shown in Figure 7. The process was pretty painless with all of the necessary FTP settings presented in a simple dialog box. Publishing to a .Mac account is even easier.
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Figure 7 Uploading the completed site
Emily’s very happy with her Web site and especially enjoys getting e-mail from people who take her quiz. The site looks professionally designed, and its style sheets are completely standards-compliant, thanks to RealMac’s careful adherence to World Wide Web Consortium specifications. The Pets page is shown in Figure 8.
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Figure 8 The Pets page as displayed within Safari