RapidWeaver allows users with any level of expertise to build beautiful and professional looking websites. The novice user will love the drag and drop, what you see is what you get interface. Advanced users will love that they can get down and dirty with some code when they need to.
This book covers all aspects of developing a website with RapidWeaver. Whether you want a family website to display photos from your latest vacation or a small business that is looking to increase your web presence, this book has got you covered. If you have a Mac and want a website, you need this book.
This book dives into all the components required to build a website with RapidWeaver. The first half of this book builds upon itself and shows you all of the basic building blocks that you will need to develop great websites. It starts off with a basic tour of RapidWeaver and gets you building your first webpage in the first chapter. The book progresses onto how to customize the look and feel of your website with themes and adding simple webpages with text and images all the way to blogs and photo galleries.
The second half of the book dives into more advanced topics that can really help you take your websites to the next level. These include e-commerce, blogs, managing web content outside of RapidWeaver, Search Engine Optimization, and even a little programming. By the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation that will allow you to build powerful websites.
Chapter 1, Getting Started — In this first chapter, we are going to hit the ground running. We are going to go from zero to a deployed website by the end of this chapter. This means that we are going to see an in-depth review of every setting.
Chapter 2, Touring RapidWeaver — In this chapter, we are going to step back a bit and take a tour of the RapidWeaver interface, preferences, and inspector windows. We are going to review every nook and cranny throughout the interface.
Chapter 3, Theming Your Site — In this chapter, we are going to review all the aspects of applying themes to your website. We will, specifically, look at topics such as choosing and managing themes, saving theme styles, customizing themes, and more.
Chapter 4, Styled Text Page — In this chapter, we will be reviewing the Styled Text page. The Styled Text page is an extremely versatile page type. You can add images, audio, video, and file downloads all without knowing an ounce of code! The Styled Text framework is not limited to just the Styled Text page. This means that everything that you are about to learn in this chapter can also be applied to most of the other RapidWeaver pages and plugins as well.
Chapter 5, Stacks — In this chapter, we will be reviewing the Stacks add-on of RapidWeaver. We will not only learn how to install and work with Stacks, we will also review its toolbars and settings, templates, and the default stack elements that ship with this add-on.
Chapter 6, Basic Page Types — In this chapter, we will be reviewing a few common page types and elements that are used throughout web design. Some of these are out-of-the-box page types that ship with RapidWeaver, and others are third-party developer plugins or stacks.
Chapter 7, Multimedia Pages — Websites would be pretty boring if they did not have media. So, in this chapter we will learn how to add images and videos, and also learn how files can be shared on our website.
Chapter 8, Blogs, Podcasts, and Going Social — In this chapter, we will learn how to create blogs and podcasts. We will also learn about integrating Wordpress, Tumblr, and social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, to our website.
Chapter 9, E-Commerce — In this chapter, we will learn how we can easily build our own online store using RapidWeaver. There aren't any page plugins which ship with RapidWeaver that allow you to do this; however, we will see how we can build our online store by simply copying and pasting some freely available code snippets.
We will also briefly review a few third-party add-ons that provide a robust and easy-to-use interface. As online sales is an enormous topic, we will be focusing on the easiest way to get your online store up and running quickly.
Chapter 10, Search Engine Optimization — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the black magic of web design. Essentially, it's the process that you need to go through in order to get the search engines to recognize your website and make sure that your web pages are provided as results to people who are searching on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others.
In this chapter, we are going to be reviewing topics such as increasing popularity with search engines, the technical basics of SEO. We will also learn about plugins such as Sitemap, Meta Mate, and others.
This chapter also covers the analytics services that will allow you to track tons of various metrics about who is visiting your website.
Chapter 11, Advanced Weaving — In this chapter we are going to try to cram in as many tips and track as we can. Some of these are RapidWeaver-specific topics; however, most are going to be about general web design, followed by the summary of this chapter.
The primary requirement for this book is Apple Mac OS X 10.6.8+ and RapidWeaver 5. The author refers to lots of optional software throughout this book, which may be installed as and when required.
If you are a novice wanting to build your first website or an experienced user looking for a better way to develop your existing websites, then this book is for you. This book is perfect for iWeb users who are looking for something better. It's also great for advanced users who use applications such as Dreamweaver, and are looking for a simpler way to develop websites without sacrificing the ability to get into the code.
Using this book, you can build entire websites without writing a single line of code. But if you know a little web programming, then you will be able to take your websites to the next level.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
Action 1
Action 2
Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "."
A block of code is set as follows:
<div id="myExtraContent1">
<!-- Your content goes here -->
</div>New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Simply select the text that you want to make as your heading and from the Format menu, select any heading from 1 to 6".
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