Rapidweaver Chat

David, what do you think of Rapid Weaver, are they up to date on responsive/flexible? Are they dependent on 3rd party themes? (great idea, but there is an expense)

I like Rapid Weaver a lot and have been using it virtually form the beginning. I was teaching at the time and needed something that I could teach students who wanted to get up and running quickly and the basic software does that very well. Eventually I needed something more and started using 3rd party themes and plugins. Now I am using it for small business, blogs and ecommerce. I like to provide support for people who are doing their own thing such as artists and complementary therapists. So the Armadillo blog and Rapid cart pro do it very well for me. For more advanced designs I am starting to look at integrating Hype.

IMO Rapidweaver does responsive well though standard themes don’t seem to be quite flexible enough for what I want to do so I pretty well always use a third party theme, usually a pro version of one of the themes that comes with RW. Plus Stacks. I guess that puts me in the middle of the range of RW users. My clients want to create their own content but aren’t too interested in the back end. I consider it an alternative to Wordpress only much easier.

Now it is up against Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and so on and while I haven’t done the math my sense of it is that it is better value for money than those. What do others think?

Thanks for the info. I have been doing my sites in Hype and really would prefer to do that because to me it is the most efficient interface by a long way, but I do recognize I should go into something like that. I think I will spend some time on it.

Used Freeway for several years, but they may or may not still be in business. I thought I liked Sparkle, but it lacks some functionality, the developer says he is working on it, but its too minimal in its interface, many features are difficult to find. It requires custom themes to get control of full page background images, too, and that shouldnt happen.

I have dabbled in Rapid Weaver, was concerned about the need to buy different stacks etc, but if you are telling me that you are good with it, then I dont mind buying a few.

I also have Responsive Site Designer, love how they do responsive, but they come from a pure coding background and Windows, the effect us that they are VERY much into menus for EVERYTHING, you have to be willing to commit to a lot of training time before you can do much. And if you are away from it for a week or two its difficult to refresh your memory on the menus.

I did a 4-5 month full time web redo this summer on Joomla, and a Squarespace site about a year ago, not likely to dabble in CMS’s again. Joomla at least is really just like a jumble of cardboard shipping containers, its NOT the product, that’s content which still has to be created or modified. Very hard to get the client to understand that fact. "it’s Joomla, it has to be easy, that’s what they advertise’ He paid $28,000 for the original site 5 years ago, I had t use the original theme, not responsive. 26 pages, several hundred documents. And you have to buy modules, extensions, plug-ins to do what you want. It’s still not responsive and can’t be without a theme change.

The other thing I learned is that I am not willing to work in a situation where the client produces their own content unless they have a lot of experience. I have been working with images, Photoshop since 1993 and now Pixelmator for 5 years and I have learned a lot about enhancing images. I am working on a site now that has 250+ jewelry images, the client has no background in photography, and its costing me a lot of heavily discounted time in order to get the job done so that it looks reasonable. This will be the last time on that.

Thanks for the RapidWeaver info, I just remembered it a couple of days ago, and your comments came at the right time, I will look into it more.

To do a good job with rapidweaver, you need some accessories.
the STACKS plugin and a professional theme.
All (free) new themes included in RW7 are responsive but you can buy more, as for WP but with a lower cost.

The expense is offset by the quality of the result and the time taken for the job.
integration with Hype is possible via iframe.

the RW ecosystem is quite reliable and all the developers offer direct support.

the use of RW depends a lot on how much the developer’s time costs, it is one of the fastest programs. If you buy an EXTRA stacks plugin, you can do almost anything

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Thanks for the information, always great to get info from those who have experience. I have
RW7, great to know which stacks to get and about the developers. I dabbled a couple of years ago, but shied away because of all the stacks, not knowing which were worth it or not.

Update: checked out their new group of stacks, fewer developers but much better quality and content since the last time I looked a couple of years ago.

I agree. The plug-in developers as well as the folks at RealMac I’ve worked with have been quick (and patient!). The forums are active and helpful for people of all levels of experience.