Today's Best Tech Deals
However the spectre of responsive web design has been weighing on my mind of late, even though I can & do create dedicated mobile pages it is a lot more work, although I do prefer the look of dedicated pages as responsive tend to be quite plain & all the same. These are the best website builders we've tested for making it easy to create full-featured, mobile-compatible sites on a budget. Website Design Tools.
Picked by Macworld's Editors
Top Deals On Great Products
Picked by Techconnect's Editors
Softpress Systems Freeway Express 6
Read Macworld's reviewRiver SRL Sparkle
Read Macworld's reviewKarelia Software Sandvox 2
Read Macworld's reviewRealmac Software RapidWeaver 6
Read Macworld's reviewMacaw 1.5
Read Macworld's reviewRage Software EverWeb 1.8.2
Read Macworld's reviewCazoobi Blocs 1.3
Read Macworld's review
A crowded slate of Mac apps aim to make building a full-featured, modern website drag-and-drop simple. Many even support one of the most crucial new web trends: responsive design, which can automatically switch up your layout to look good on a widescreen monitor, a tiny smartphone, or anything in between.
While no single program currently offers all the power, flexibility, and simplicity I’d hoped for, I did find two particularly strong contenders that at least came within shouting distance of that ideal.
Top choice for complete beginners: Blocs
If you have no idea how to start building a site, start with Blocs (). At $70, it’s $10 cheaper than most of the other programs in this roundup. And thanks to its extensive library of well-crafted chunks of code, it makes assembling an impressively slick site almost as simple as snapping together a pile of Lego blocks.
Even before you begin, Blocs has done the hard work for you, building snippets of sample code that you can mix, match, customize, and stack. Just pick a clearly color-coded section of your design—header, body, or footer—and choose a chunk of layout to add, whether it’s a fancy screen-filling photo, a few columns of text, or a swath of smaller icons or images. Once it’s in place, you can tweak the template to suit your needs. At every turn, Blocs tries to sweat the small stuff so you don’t have to, including a navigation menu that’ll automatically update as you add new pages to your site.
Spartan but clear thumbnails help you choose which chunk to add next, and accurately represent what you’re getting. While you’re limited largely to that ready-made collection, Blocs offers a wide enough selection of appealing elements to build an appealing site. And since all the code’s prebuilt, every site you make in Blocs has responsive design support baked in, without any extra effort on your part. The sample site I built looked great on big and small computer screens, good on my iPad, and decent enough on my iPhone 5S.
Blocs’ balance between a sparse selection and effective results also applies to its feature set, including a limited but appealing roster of fonts, and its extremely basic control over text styling and padding. That deliberate simplicity helps keep new users from getting overwhelmed, and further flattens out the already gentle learning curve.
Blocs’ stark, dark design departs from Mac conventions, and some aspects take a little time to learn. Instead of bringing up contextual menus, right-clicking brings up a palette of individual page elements you can add to the existing code. Placing objects on the page can occasionally feel a tad squirrely, though it’s easy to undo mistakes or move a misplaced item.
Blocs is a work in progress, and its creator’s laid out an ambitious, intriguing slate of potential upgrades. For now, Blocs sets modest goals, but carries them out impressively well.
Top choice for everyone else: EverWeb
If you know just enough HTML and CSS to get yourself in trouble, trust EverWeb () to keep you out of it. It’s more flexible and freeform than Blocs’ do-it-for-me simplicity, and it’s full of thoughtful tricks to help users get around the program’s own limitations.
When creating a site, you can choose from an extensive slate of great-looking, up-to-date templates, or start from scratch. Like Pages, EverWeb lets you draw text and image boxes or other shapes directly onto your page, then position and style them as you wish. I liked the program’s clean design and well-crafted interface. It lacks a grid or guides to keep your page tidy, but EverWeb will automatically or manually align elements by their edges or centers. The layout engine sometimes had trouble accurately aligning full-width elements, but otherwise proved fun and responsive.
EverWeb offers more options for CSS styling than Blocs; it won’t give you precise control of every element, but it provides enough choices to make a nice-looking site. Top-notch prebuilt widgets, including image sliders, image galleries, navigation menus, and more, are easy to edit and customize, and they yield great results. I was particularly impressed with the PayPal widget, which lets you build a full-featured online store with minimal time and effort—an ability most rivals either don’t offer or charge extra for.
Rather than supporting responsive design, EverWeb provides mobile versions of many templates, and builds in an easy way to redirect mobile users to those pages from their desktop counterparts. That solution gobbles extra server space and bandwidth, but can also be less hassle than trying to reconfigure the same design to fit different-sized screens. Other clever workarounds let you expand EverWeb’s font roster with your own picks, a feature found in too few of its competitors.
The code EverWeb produced was somewhat messy in the version I tested, though by the time you read this, an update promising sleeker results may be available. Still, I enjoyed EverWeb’s terrific balance between friendly design and a robust feature set.
Top contenders
Macaw
Macaw () talks a big game but doesn’t entirely deliver. Aimed at high-end pros, it offers more power and flexibility than any other program here. However, it’s also the most intimidating and frustrating app of the bunch, in part because it feels only half-finished.
Macaw excels at its finer points. You can tweak nearly every CSS style attribute via well-designed palettes, and build custom style classes to apply to any element on your page. Smart scripting support lets you drag in existing variables and color swatches as you write your code. And only Macaw offers pixel-precise control over responsive design, letting you set breakpoints at multiple screen widths, then rearrange your design to best fit each one.
But while it gets the little things right, Macaw seems to struggle with the big ones. I found layout exasperating, as if the program were always fighting me. The help files are sometimes confusing and often incomplete—bad news for a program as dense as this one. You can only add to its limited list of fonts by paying for a subscription to Adobe Typekit. And rather than focusing on fixing these gaps in the existing version, Macaw’s creators seem instead to be working on its new sibling, Macaw Scarlet, which promises even more sophisticated features.
RapidWeaver
If you just want to pour your content into a limited set of sharp-looking templates, with responsive design already built in, RapidWeaver () will work great. This powerfully extensible program can do far more than that, too‑but you’ll have to pay a good deal extra to unlock its full potential.
RapidWeaver’s by far the best choice here for building a blog or a podcast, with excellent, easy support for adding new entries and episodes. But I didn’t like how it forced me to flip back and forth between the raw content on my pages and a full preview of how they’d look online.
If you want to branch out beyond its small slate of templates, keep your wallet handy. The app’s online market of powerful plugins offers tons of new capabilities and professionally designed themes. But their considerable cost could quickly add up to more than you paid for RapidWeaver itself.
The rest of the pack
Sandvox
Sandvox () loses points for its limited customization and big but outdated selection of designs. However, it’s delightfully easy to use, including a super-simple integrated hosting service that seems fairly priced for what it offers. And changing the whole look of your site is as easy as choosing a new template. I think Sandvox would make a great choice for teachers and students, or for parents who want to help their kids build a fun, basic site.
Sparkle
Sparkle () is a perfectly respectable app that unfortunately gets outshined by EverWeb, which feels like Sparkle’s very similar-looking but ultimately superior cousin. I give Sparkle kudos for at least trying to make it easy to add third-party web fonts, even if the execution’s a little clunky. Its preset page sizes for responsive design also work better in concept than reality. Sparkle could become a real gem, but it needs more polish first.
Freeway Express
Living up to its name, Freeway Express () is free. And if you endure its labyrinthine help files, you can build some nifty things relatively quickly. But its cluttered interface can prove frustrating, and it renders pages with such sorely outdated techniques—years behind every other app here–that you’re probably better off avoiding it. A paid pro version offers a much more power and sophistication, but also costs a whopping $150.
Bottom line
Text editors are cheap or free, as are resources to teach yourself HTML, CSS, and jQuery—all more intuitive than they sound, even for non-geniuses. But that education demands dedication, time, and persistence, especially since today’s cutting-edge code quickly becomes tomorrow’s cobweb-covered embarrassment.
If you’d rather opt out of that Red Queen’s race, you’ll at least have a few good choices, whether you pick Blocs’ sleek simplicity or EverWeb’s user-friendly flexibility. I suspect Mac users will have even better, more complete options for building websites in a year or two. But for now, those two are the best of the bunch.
Softpress Systems Freeway Express 6
Read Macworld's reviewRiver SRL Sparkle
Read Macworld's reviewKarelia Software Sandvox 2
Read Macworld's reviewRealmac Software RapidWeaver 6
Read Macworld's reviewMacaw 1.5
Read Macworld's reviewRage Software EverWeb 1.8.2
Read Macworld's reviewCazoobi Blocs 1.3
Read Macworld's review
Everyone, who wants to develop websites, needs an HTML editor or rather a development environment. There are, of course, several fee-based editors of high quality, but if you do not need your development environment every day, a free application will be perfectly fine. That an editor is free of charge does not mean that it is of low quality. One of the best development environments is available as permanently free evaluation version. You can “test” it as long as you want. However, if the editor suits you, you should be fair and purchase it. Below, we present you a selection of the best free HTML editors for macOS.
CotEditor 2.o
CotEditor is a relatively new and fresh development for everyone who doesn’t need his editor on a daily basis and simply wants a good editor with syntax highlighting. You can consider CotEditor as Notepad++ for OS X. It provides, besides a viable code completion, a very good search-and-replace function, a split view to partition the editor window in several fields, good syntax highlighting for 40 programming languages and comes with eight themes. For a simple editor, you can customize the application more than you’d have expected; the editor is certainly worth trying out.
This is one of the eight themes:
Brackets
Brackets is a modern open source editor with several extremely interesting features. For example, when used in combination with Adobe Creative Cloud Extract (=preview) it can read design data such as colors, types, histories etc. directly from a PSD file and transform it into minimalistic, correct CSS code. Likewise, you can extract layers as images, use the information from the PSD as variables in a preprocessor, and easily determine distances and proportions of elements – all without exiting the editor. Please remember: Using Adobe Creative Cloud requires a paid subscription.
Best Web Design Tool For Mac 2017
Another significant advantage of Brackets are the expansions, which you can use to customize the editor to your needs. Every three or four weeks another extension becomes available. The full support of preprocessors should also be mentioned. With Brackets, you can use “quick edit” and “live preview” when working with LESS as well as SCSS files, which makes the working process much easier. Together with the right extensions and Adobe Creative Cloud (Extract), this editor can even cover the needs of a professional.
Best Web Design App For Mac
A short video introduction to Brackets
Sublime Text 2
Sublime Text 2 is the minimalistic favorite of developers, because it can easily be completely customized to one’s own needs by using a JSON file. Moreover, there are several extensions to “stretch” the editor with. For example, a must-have extension is Package Control, which you can use to easily find and install extensions and plug-ins from right within the editor. To describe the full extent of features of Sublime Text 2 is rather difficult, as it can do, through its plug-ins and extensions, basically anything you need it to do. As an example for a useful plug-in, look at the Bracket Highlighter (for finding connected brackets and tags), Emmet (previously Zen Coding – for extremely fast coding) and Sublime Linter (draws attention to mistakes in the source code).
A high-quality auto-completion feature is already built into Sublime Text 2. There are also several themes to choose from. A lot more can be installed. All standard functions such as search and replace are, of course, included. The editor is available as an evaluation version without enforced time limit, so that you may use it for free permanently. Nonetheless, you should purchase the license for fairness sake if you are certain that you will keep the editor on permanent rotation.
Google Web Designer
Yes, Google also provides tools for web designers. However, Google Web Designer works more like Adobe Dreamweaver.. It is not a pure HTML editor, but a combined WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) and text editor. You can work with both interfaces, the graphical interface, and the code-view. Google Web Designer is supposed to generate correct HTML5 and CSS3 code from the graphical interface. Whether it does so correctly, will be determined by an extensive test. Stay tuned…
Without thorough testing, there is little to be said about this editor. Even the information on the website of the editor is rather sparse, which may be down to the fact that it is still in its beta phase. However, the concept is interesting.
Aptana Studio 3
The Aptana Studio is one of the best known and most versatile development environments there are. It is a powerful tool, which supports the most important coding and markup languages, such as HTML (including HTML5), CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ruby. With Git integration, a debugger for Ruby and JavaScript, an inbuilt terminal with the option for extensions, Aptana Studio is equipped for any purpose. Aptana is available as a stand-alone version or as Eclipse plug-in. The newest web standards are generally supported. What I dislike: a documentation does not seem to be available (anymore) as the link in question leads to another destination. Bummer.
Decided Not to Code? Take a Look at Mobirise
Web Design Apps For Mac
If you just ran into this article to find HTML editors that take away the coding part from you, you’ll have found out by now that this is the wrong place. To not lose you leaving completely disappointed I want to advise you to take a look at Mobirise. Mobirise is an installable editor, too. The difference to the others mentioned here is that it does not let you fiddle with the code. Instead, it completely keeps you away from that. We have written a full-fledged article on Mobirise and I strongly encourage you to check it out.
Mobirise is available for Windows and macOS and comes fully free of charge. If you need a fully responsive website in the fastest way possible, ditch the code editors and head over to Mobirise.
Conclusion
Some of the best HTML editors for Mac OS X are free or available as an evaluation version with no enforced time limit. Sublime Text (the latter) is extremely fast and can be customized without much fiddling. I use Sublime Text 2 as well. However, Brackets also seems to be very interesting. A test will show how good it actually is. It is already installed, and I will use it for the next coding session. A review is, therefore, inevitable.
Related links:
(dpe)