Web design is a bit of a black art.

Anyone armed with a 'Dummies' book can knock together a page of HTML that will display in everything from NCSA Mosaic to Safari 3.1, but creating something richer – with navigation, images, dynamically updating sidebars and more – that conforms to XHTML and CSS standards is a much bigger challenge.

Web design made easy

Sure, Apple has iWeb, but it lacks flexibility and doesn't encourage you to learn more about web design. And that's something that RapidWeaver has always done well.

It's easy to create a site, add a bunch of pages and write or import some content and publish it to .Mac (or MobileMe), a folder on your Mac, or to some FTP space; RapidWeaver will take care of creating the navigation, setting encoding so that exotic characters don't render as gobbledegook and more.

But better than that, it lets you grow. As you learn, RapidWeaver lets you use that knowledge to create more interesting and rich websites.

RapidWeaver's strengths

The first step in creating a site when you launch RapidWeaver is to add some pages.

There is a wide range of page types available – everything from word processor-like Style Text pages to photo galleries, movie showreels and regularly updated blog pages – and a thriving ecosystem of third-party developers is dedicated to creating plug-ins that allow you to add even more different page types; Blocks from www.yourhead.com gives you iWeb-like flexibility in placing content anywhere you like on a page, and Lockdown from www.loghound.com lets you create pages that are password-protected.

Once you've got your pages – you can nest them infinitely deep by dragging and dropping them on top of each other; RapidWeaver will create all the links and navigation for you automatically – you just need to enter some content.

In the edit mode you can just type some stuff into text pages, and there's tight integration with iLife and core Mac technologies so that you can pop up an 'iMedia Browser' to find and copy content from iMovie, Safari, iTunes and iPhoto; indeed, creating online galleries from iPhoto albums is as simple as selecting the album you want to share and entering some captions.

Vast array of styles

RapidWeaver comes with over 40 visual styles – called themes – that you can add to your site.