Best Mac Website Design Programs
A Macintosh webmaster's toolbox needs Mac website creation - authoring - design software that lets you rapidly prototye and deploy a website on OSX. While many site owner's opt for building sites up in the cloud on thier Hosting company using WordPress or something like Drupal or Joomla - Other's prefer building and keeping their web site content and files stored on their MacBook or Macintosh desktop and publishing up to their host.
RapidWeaver For OSX
This Mac Webmaster Tips site was done in RealMac Software's RapidWeaver For Mac
A good selection of page types in RapidWeaver lets even the trial version build a rather well rounded site with either HTML or Styled text pages, Photo gallery or Movie pages, and built in Blog page type which is downright elegant and very easy to update and add posts to once configured and the RSS Feed, Pinging, Categories and Tags are set up properly.
Pro Website Authoring On A Mac - Dreamweaver
Need to pull out the Big Guns? Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 For MacFreeWay For Mac - Express and Pro
Another affordable option for building websites quick is Freeway 5 Express
Sandvox
A free trial version of Karelia Software's Sandvox is available for OSX website owners to try out and prototype a 1-page website with. This popular web design program for the Mac may not enjoy quite the extensive 3rd-party support RapidWeaver does, but it is a very, very good Apple compatible web authoring program, with very slick and appealing themes and templates bundled in. For MMO Money Sites, some Amazon pagelet integration makes adding products and monetizing a site a bit easier. Overall, Sandvox is a bit deeper and more elegant website design app than Rapid-Weaver at a slightly higher cost - and available in a regular and a more fully-featured Pro version most webmasters will want for fully optimized site creation.
Web Host Based Site Builders
You don't even necessarily need to run web authoring software on your Mac is you so choose. Many site creation apps live up in 'the cloud' on top hosting companies like: GoDaddy Hosting, HostGator.com, and iPage.com - Any Mac running any OSX web browser can access these site building tools.
Literally millions of websites are built using site authoring applications that reside on your web host. Most notably the ubiquitious WordPress and it's appealing plethora of Plug-ins, add-ons, SEO optimizing modules and a wealth of online support and global community of users. If WordPress has an achille's heel, it's it's use of SQL to roll ALL of your sites content and posts into a big database that MUST get backed up properly. Very, very different than simply backing up a folder of your site HTML stored locally on your Mac's hard drive. Wordpress is just the tip of the iceberg. Hosting companies usually offer 1-Click installs of not only WordPress, but Joomla, Drupal, Concrete and many other web page creation apps, content management systems and site builders.
The Big SEO NO! Apple iWeb A Bad Choice For SEO Optimized Sites
For those who have a MobileMe - me.com account and any Mac that came bundled with Apple's iLife - you might be tempted to create a website with iWeb. That's fine if you're just sharing stories, video clips and photos with family and friends is your intent. But IWEB IS HORRIBLE FOR SEO and a very poor choice for running a business website or trying to MMO - Make money online with your Mac. iWeb's site and page structure simply is NOT search engine optimized and utterly lacks the SEO tools you need to create pages that will rank well with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and others. There are hacks and workarounds to try to make iWeb sites more SEO-SEM friendly - but it's a fool's game trying to fix what's ultimately broken from the ground up. You'd be far better off registering a new domain, with cheap Mac-friendly Linux hosting and starting from scratch. That's the bottom line to insure your Search marketing and optimization success.






