My old self always wanted to use the best tool for the job. I still have DW at my disposal, but I use a new tool called RapidWeaver. RW is a content management system with some extra flexibility that keeps my creative side happy, but let's me get things online quickly, beautifully and professionally. A content management system (CMS) is usually thought of a server application for a large organization web page creation. Moodle is a sort of content management system. Basically you fill in the text and other media content like images, sound and video, but then the CMS does the layout and design work for you based on a design template you've selected. The cool thing is that you can change designs on the fly without upsetting your content. It boils down to this, am I publishing information or am I designing a site from scratch that has to have an absolutely unique look and feel? RW's ability to utilize straight html and php is what sets it apart from others such as iWeb (see Wrap-Up for more) so I'm not totally hemmed into the 10 or so page styles available.

If you look in the sidebar on this page you can see the different kinds of pages available from a personal blogging system to photo albums to file sharing to raw HTML. Really there's not any standard "off the shelf" web publishing chore that I can't do with RW. I'm going to put some content on each page type to give you examples. In short with RW you can create a variety of page types with unique functionality that can have visual continuity based on the template them selected.

When you're done looking at the examples go the to Wrap - Up link for my summary.

Page Type #1 Stylized Text
RapidWeaver let's you write in "stylized text" which is basically saying it's like a simple word processor. You can put specific html tags in, but it's easiest to stick with plain old font attributes. This is great for being able to quickly whip up a page without having to mess around with any layout.

As you'll notice in the navigation bar on the right. This page is indented under "My Web Edit History." When setting up and adding pages you can nest pages to create topics and subtopics. It's a just a drag and drop to move things around and change the entire navigation/organization of the site.