A brief visit to Sidney Spit on Saturday afternoon yielded a few photos and a sore back (after losing my footing on some driftwood).  Sidney Spit is part of the Gulf Islands National Park and is a great place to spend a few hours walking along the white sandy beach and through the wooded trails.  A large meadow is home to a large number of Fallow deer and a few campers too.  This area was once home to the Sidney Brick and Tile factory (1906 - 1915), evidence of which covers the beach.  For more information on the Gulf Islands National Park check out the Parks Canada website. 

My first blog entry has to be dedicated to Sandvox, the software used to build this site.  I've coded websites by hand for over 10 years but time constraints in the past few years had left my sites badly neglected.  I've been searching for a simple tool that will let me focus on content and not on HTML.

Having moved to the Mac many years ago I naturally hoped iWeb would be the answer.  I was disappointed in how restricted version 1.1 was but I had high hopes for version 2.x as I heard it would finally support personal domains (ie. www.steveclifford.com).  I was even willing to fork over another $139 for a 1-year subscription to .Mac.

I upgraded to iLife '08 ($79.99) last week.  It wasn't long before I realized I would have to make several compromises: support for only a single domain, no support for email addresses at that domain, indifferent technical support, etc..  The word on the boards was not good ... those upgrading old iWeb sites were having major problems.  Furthermore it was reported that navigation menus generated by iWeb weren't visible in Internet Explorer.  The buzz was Apple was blaming Microsoft and vice versa.  Apple could be right but when 80% of surfers can't navigate your website it's a major problem.  The final straw came when I discovered that uploaded photos were undergoing some sort of colour correction that rendered them faded and dull.  Check out the difference in vibrancy between these photos:

Photo displayed via Sandvox generated site

Photo displayed via iWeb generated site

Totally unacceptable IMHO.  I'm sure Apple will eventually sort out these problems but after waiting two years I wasn't willing to wait any more.

I initially looked at RapidWeaver as I heard it's name mentioned quite a bit.  However I wasn't totally happy with the interface and decided to have another look around.  Happily I discovered Sandvox and have never looked back.  I can now manage multiple websites and publish changes by FTP'ing to my ISP (so long .Mac).  It includes a media inspector similar to iWeb and also includes a great collection of "pagelets" and "collections" templates that can have you up and running fast (I re-launched this site in under two hours.

The demo version provides full functionality but restricts you to publishing a single page per website.  A single license costs $49 while the Pro version will set you back $79 (but you can upgrade to the Pro version at any time for $30). If you're an iWeb refugee like me, do yourself a favour and check out Sandvox.