What child doesn't like playing in a sandbox? There are virtually no rules and no limits to an imagination: building cities, castles and caves with simple tools. Sandvox captures the spontaneity of childhood sandbox pleasures with a less evanescent and more practical end product: websites for small businesses.
The 12 Best Features of Sandvox
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What you see is what you get: Once the exclusive domain of serious geeks, website design entered the WYSIWYG era as far back as 1994 with Adobe Pagemill. Then the end result was extremely limited. The term WYSIWYG has since become trite. Today we expect it. And Sandvox does it well. With an attractive and intuitive interface you can rapidly build, visualize, debug, and publish websites. Choose from more than a dozen basic page styles, dress them up with nearly 20 Pagelet options (code snippets, images, video, or text), and then see what it all looks like on-the-fly with various site theme templates before publishing.
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Trendy or traditional at the touch of a button: The ability to transform the entire look of a site at the touch of button keeps a Web presence fresh. Download a new third-party theme; apply it to your site. If you're happy with the result, press the Publish button and experience a whole new site design for the nominal developer fee (often less than $25).
Occasionally it may be necessary to replace header graphics but most themes come with a selection from with to choose. For the most flexibility with silhouetted images, use the PNG format with transparency. Files are larger than JPEG but allow background colors to show through. (Caveat: PNG images are not properly viewable in Internet Explorer 6 and earlier due to an Internet Explorer bug.)
- Parent and child sidebars: Most pages have the option to include a sidebar. Depending on the design, it can be located on the left or right side. A directory index is a Parent; other pages in that directory are children. Sandvox includes the option to include Pagelets from the Parent sidebar on Child pages. This really improves navigation of related text entries like FAQ or blogs.
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Inspector gadget: Get familiar with the contextual Inspector panel and pages can be expanded with a wide range of features. Enable reader comments on a blog, show or hide a sidebar, add a page thumbnail image and much more.
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Easy keyboard commands for common HTML: For a paragraph space (<p>), press the return key. For a line brake (<br />), press option-return. For a non-breaking space ( ), press option-space bar. Highlight text and choose a color from the picker; Sandvox adds the HTML tag with appropriate Hex values understood by Web browsers. Shift-option-command-v to paste text while retaining target formatting.
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No man is an island: Sandvox provides deep integration with search engine products like Google. It's almost like having your own SEO living inside the application. Sites are generally searchable on Google within a matter of days.
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Resources are available to monetize sites: Even if you have no particular product or service beyond perhaps a blog, Sandvox offers the tools to integrate with Amazon, Google, and Yahoo! merchant and affiliate services.
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An injection we can actually enjoy: It took a while to realize the ultimate power and many advantages of Code Injection. Modify properties for individual pages or the entire site by overriding CSS attributes or adding meta tags. For example you can include "noindex" tags to pages used for short-term private promotions so they won't be crawled by search engine crawlers.
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Drag and drop pages from one Sandvox site to the other: When doing so, pages inherit the CSS attributes of the target site and pages dragged as a group retain local hypertext links. Local page links outside the dragged group need to be restablished and page names revert to defaults.
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Flexible system requirements: When Mac vs. PC wars were popular, one of the main arguments from the Mac camp was that the investment lasted many more years. With no disrespect to the beautiful multi-core Intel Macs in the current lineup, millions of prior generation PowerBooks and Power Macs are still in use. Sandvox transforms them into viable website development platforms by supporting Mac OS 10.4.11 (Tiger) for sites of less than 50 pages through the current operating system 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Editor note: Next version of Sandvox will drop support for Tiger.
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Service beyond the sale: Through searchable online help, forums, Yahoo! Groups, application feedback, and email, Karalia Software reaches out to customers with tips, solutions, updates and support well after the software sale. The group appears to be sincerely interested in helping users make a success of their online business endeavors.
- Priced below $100, Sandvox is a bargain: Choose free Trial, $57 Standard, or $97 Pro version. Either one is a bargain though I recommend Pro to have access to editable HTML and Code Injection. At these attractive price points I invite you to come play in the Sandvox. Let your imagination run wild and your business flourish.