Going Beyond All Flash and No Cash
Much to the chagrin of Adobe, Steve Jobs reportedly pronounced the imminent death of Flash – a buggy Web browser plugin used for creating much of the website eye candy in use today. In a style reminiscent of his famous quote to Sculley: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want to chance to change the world?" Jobs said of Flash (according to Gawker), "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology." And then went on to compare Flash to the floppy drive and now vanishing music CDs.
Adobe Flash can manipulate vector graphics, raster images, and stream audio and video. Many graphic design majors graduate with the skills to prepare impressive looking websites that have little commercial value. But you don't need Flash to have a Web presence. And if you want to be visible on the most popular smart phone or upcoming iPad, you don't want Flash.
Everyone is Invited to the Web
The notion of publishing content on the Web is no longer novel. You can post your family photos on Flickr or rate your favorite BBQ eateries on Yahoo! Local. Businesses can even establish a presence on sites like HotFrog.com.
The mighty arm of Apple has even chimed in with iWeb as an easy integrated solution for users with the latest Mac OS and optimally a MobileMe account. However, Apple offerings shut out millions of PowerMacs and PowerBooks still in use today, since iWeb system requirements call for an Intel Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard (OS X 10.5 or 10.6). Even with the latest Mac OS, is iWeb a viable solution for business owners?
It is Expensive to Be Cheap
Make no mistake about it. Maintaining a commercial website is an expensive investment. On the low end you can spend spend several hundred dollars a month -- 4 or 5 digits a year. There are many hidden costs beyond a hosting fee. The $20 or even $200 difference between competing software products is a miniscule consideration when evaluating the overall equation. It takes considerable time and money to optimize sites for search engines and pay for top ranking positions. With billions of active websites, even a "pretty" site can be overlooked like new fish market in China.
Make certain your solution can scale to anticipated and even unanticipated growth patterns. It is naive to think: 'All I need is a good Home page, About page, and Contact page.' Future success or lack thereof may summon the need for an integrated merchant solution or database backend. Primarily since site maintenance products differ in the way they manage internal links, it is not very easy to migrate from one package to another.
iWeb or Sandvox?
Apple iWeb has been criticized more than twice for marketing other's inventions as its own. The most recent noteworthy example is apparent when comparing the iPad iBookstore with Delicious Library. Prior to iWeb there was Sandvox. In each case Apple adds enough of its own flare and marketing dollars to make the competitor seem irrelevant. So is Sandvox still a worthy alternative?
Both iWeb and Sandvox have similar features on the surface. Things that are easy for one might be accomplished with extra effort in the other. In other cases you have to pick a side. The first advantage in favor of Sandvox is support for Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) through 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
The Sandvox website recently made further distinction: "iWeb has some serious flaws when it comes to building serious websites. If you want people to find your iWeb website with Google or other search engines, you need to perform several tedious steps to modify the HTML of the published iWeb website.
"Sandvox, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up to create websites that Search Engines will [easily] find and list. If you have a business or organization that you want people to find, consider Sandvox as the serious alternative to iWeb."
Currently I maintain four websites with Sandvox Pro (seven if you count mobile versions). From my perspective, though some of the iWeb templates may be more beautiful to look at, Sandvox offers better tools for commerce sites.
The Reactive Imaging website implements such features as versatile Pagelets, Code Injection, Blogs, and RSS feeds alongside Google search engine optimization and a PayPal online merchant solution. Perhaps one of the most interesting of these is the ability to search over 700 pages of content across two websites via Google indexing. Impressive as this is, it does have the limitation of excluding recent pages until Google has a chance to crawl and update its index.
For some companies, Sandvox is not powerful enough. The point is, however, that it was created for businesses that use Macintosh hardware. If you fall into that category, it is worth consideration.