Make Dead Easy Websites With Mac Design Software Sandvox

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Welcome to Sandvox

Karelia Software announced a major upgrade to the company’s flagship Sandvox product Tuesday, making it possible even for CEOs to quickly and easily build a website.

Far simpler than Dreamweaver yet more flexible and robust than iWeb, Sandvox 2.0 is designed for Mac and brings fully competent web design within the realm of possibility for those with nothing more than a desire for presence on the Internet and a vague idea of what it should look like.

Its palette of stock site designs aren’t especially cutting-edge but what Sandvox does offer is clean and uncluttered, with a range of inoffensive color themes that should appeal to the wide audience of individuals and small business owners who may be flummoxed by an infinite variety of web-publishing platforms — and don’t want to pay an actual web designer to build an attractive, functional website.

Sandvox supports HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery, blog commenting via Disqus, IntenseDebate and Facebook Comments, and plug-ins provide support for Facebook and Twitter. In addition, a plug-in API is now available for third-party developers. Not content to live exclusively in the WYSIWYG realm, Sandvox offers “power users” a built-in Raw HTML editor to complement its object-oriented design workflow, which echos in some respects the awesome Espresso from MacRabbit.

Dan Wood, Karelia CEO, said “Our customers don’t need to know a lick of … technical stuff to drag-and-drop their way to a cool website,” and proved it in a snappy demo last week, producing a quite serviceable and engaging website with cool graphics, photos and embedded video in under half an hour.

Who knows if, as some believe, websites are dead? Perhaps the Internet is on the cusp of a brand new boom in site building (although the dwindling number of ipv4 addresses could put a wrinkle in that idea). Should that prove to be the case, Sandvox could become a standard tool in the web journeyman’s kit bag.

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