Sandvox User Profile: Daniel Jacobs

I had already built a crude website for a small book publisher 15 years ago, using Claris Home Page. For years I kept prodding myself to redesign and update my nearly all-text site, especially since Claris Home Page had become orphaned software, more and more outdated. But other projects and priorities kept intervening. Finally in autumn 2012, several events came together that forced me to launch this long overdue project. I planned to shape the text into an attractive graphic and type design, adding many graphics (mostly book-cover images). I also wanted to add many links from my site to relevant external websites and make way for a fluid expansion of content, such as sample chapters from featured books.

Doing a Google search for web-design software for Mac, I came across the TopTenREVIEWS website (http://web-design-software-review.toptenreviews.com/mac-web-design-software/)

Sandvox rated number one among the TopTenREVIEWS, commended for its well-designed templates, user-friendly editing window, and handy toolbar. So I downloaded Sandvox on a free trial basis and started training myself in its features. Sandvox tech support gave prompt and courteous answers to my email questions — even before I bought the software — to help me overcome some initial obstacles. That persuaded me to purchase Sandvox to redesign and publish my site.

I like Sandvox's friendly and flexible editing features, fluidly integrated into the Mac OS (I use Lion). The thumbnail sidebar, which shows the full sequence of pages and subpages of my developing website, provides marvelous overall design concept and control. The site-navigation bar toward the top of each page should help visitors understand and maneuver through the structure of my site. Once I set up FTP communication between my Sandvox file and my new web-hosting company, publishing and updating my site to the web became amazingly easy and fast (through Publish>Publish All or Publish>Publish Changes).