Karelia Software Sandvox 2

Sandvox is a tool for creating a complete, professional-looking website without needing to ever have to look at HTML code. Karelia software has done a nice job in making the experience of creating a website both easy and fun for people of all skill levels.

Let's face it, not all of us have time to learn HTML and CSS to produce the kind of beautiful web pages Sandvox allows us to make. Even for those that know HTML, they may find Sandvox more convenient than hand coding.

On first launch, Sandvox gives you the option to watch a well produced screencast video of the application in action. The screencast, which has chaptering for easy navigation, shows off the features of Sandvox and how to use them. It definitely beats reading the manual. It adds to the experience of the user and gets them familiar with the application even before they start using it. However, you may find that midway through, you just want to jump into making a website out of pure excitement. Sandvox has the quality that should be expected of all Macintosh applications. Sandvox is the type of third party application I would bring up that distinguishes the Macintosh developer community from the Windows one. It's all about the experience of the user, not features and sales.

With Sandvox, you don't need to have any background in web development to make gorgeous web pages. If you can navigate the web and you know how to type into text boxes, you can create almost anything you can conjure up from your head. This is really where Sandvox pulls ahead of iWeb and really distinguishes itself.

The hardest part for a lot of people is not the actual creation of the web page, but uploading it to a server. Like most web creation tools, Sandvox has one-click publishing to your server. However, Sandvox maintains a list of the most popular web hosting servers so most of the time, all you need to set up publishing is give Sandvox your username and password. If you have .Mac its even easier. It's better than publishing to a folder on your hard drive, like iWeb does, if you don't have .Mac.

Another difference between Sandvox and iWeb are the templates. iWeb has templates that you can mix and match, but once you choose a theme, you can't change it later. Sandvox lets you choose one for all of your pages, but you can change the look and design at any time after the pages are created