huibert-aalbers.com
My home away from home
Website redesign
Yesterday, after working on the project for over a month, I finally published my redesigned home page. It was long overdue, the previous design looked dated and was not designed to support mobile devices. The new site sports a modern responsive design and I really hope you enjoy the enhanced navigation experience.
Although I have some HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript experience, I certainly do not enjoy web site design. I am a lousy designer and handling the subtleties of rendering the same deign to different browsers on multiple platforms is not something that I enjoy. That said, as most techies I am way too proud to even consider outsourcing a personal web site design to a professional designer.
So, I started by looking for a tool that would allow me to keep design activities to a minimum and focus on content. After evaluating several options, I finally settled on RapidWeaver, a Mac application developed by Realmac Software. This may come as a surprise to many, as RapidWeaver by itself is a quite unremarkable piece of software. It would be quite easy to argue that at US$79.99, it is way overpriced for what it does.
For all of its limitations, though, RapidWeaver provides one great feature, it offers extensibility through the use of plugins. One of these plugins, Stacks 2, achieves an incredible feat, it converts a mediocre product in an unmatched web design tool that is powerful, flexible and easy to use. Sure, you will probably have to invest another US$100 in plug-ins and stacks (take a look at the stacks developed by Joe Workman) to achieve whatever you want to do, but at this point you will be able to create almost any kind of complex web site with almost no effort.
I can’t really emphasize enough how pleased I am with this RapidWeaver based solution and I really recommend it to anyone who wants to develop a professional looking site without going through the hassle and cost of contracting a pro.