This post is presented by River SRL, maker of Sparkle.
Launching a business or personal brand means getting a bunch of ducks in a row. One of those ducks is building an attractive, useful website. And if you aren’t already skilled in building websites, that can seem as difficult as, well, building a duck.
Luckily, there are now a lot of ways to create websites that are easy enough for almost anyone. Sparkle, the website design app for Mac, takes that idea and runs with it. Instead of learning HTML or CSS, you can use the same skills you learned as a kid playing with PowerPoint.
Website design: Get creative without coding
Sparkle is a Mac website builder that emphasizes ease of use. Instead of molding your content into templates or frameworks, it presents a suite of simple creative tools. Basically, if you can use an app like Keynote or Pages, you can use this to design and launch a nice-looking, responsive website. It’ll even take care of SEO, to make sure your site is optimized to show up in search results.
Sparkle’s tools for laying out images and text seem totally grandma-proof. You rotate or size these website elements with a simple drag of the mouse. And you can make modifications, such as rounded edges, via simple sliders.
Want that background image to blur a bit where the text comes in? Just check the box that says “blur.” Adding video, audio, buttons and other features is similarly simple. A range of downloadable designs can be freely remixed.
Web fonts from Google make for attractive typography, while vector support and optimized image compression mean Sparkle can create visually rich pages. A live preview means you can see how the current design looks on desktop and mobile devices as you build. When you make a change, it rolls out in real time.
Meanwhile, full integration with PayPal, Google Analytics and platforms like Twitter and Facebook mean the site will come out ready to engage users’ eyeballs.
Sparkle makes Mac makes website design easy and fun
Image: River SRL
Compared to scouring StackOverflow for snippets of code, this Mac web design app makes building a website actually kind of, you know, fun.
If you’d rather DIY your website than pay for it, this is a great place to start. Sparkle offers a free version, which allows you to publish a single site with three pages and a watermark. If you need more pages or don’t want the watermark, you can upgrade to a $40 Sparkle One license. That license, which covers one or more personal Macs, will let you publish one website with unlimited pages and no branding.
The more comprehensive Sparkle Pro license for one or more personal Macs costs $79.99. It lets you build an unlimited number of websites with no page limits or branding. Cult of Mac readers can follow this link to get a 20 percent discount off Sparkle Pro.
