Sandvox 1.5 review

Sandvox is a web design application that's aimed at anyone who wants to avoid the nitty-gritty of HTML and CSS.

We looked at it during its infancy more than two years ago, but raised concerns over its performance. This latest update doesn't mark the arrival of a completely new version with lots of new features. Instead, it makes some important changes to address performance issues, particularly with large sites, and tweaks existing features to breathe new life into Sandvox going forward.

Karelia has made two changes to improve on the key concerns of speed and reliability. It has moved away from a single database file that contains all of your site's assets - even QuickTime files - and now stores them as individual files wrapped inside a standard Mac OS X package. The company has also overhauled the way data is written to the package as you make changes on a page. The old methods would account for our previously slow experience, but Sandvox 1.5 feels nippy enough on a 1.5GHz PowerBook G4.

The window layout is similar to those of iWeb and RapidWeaver, a tried and tested design that presents your site's structure in the left-hand pane. It also follows the same conventions as iLife applications for reordering and renaming pages, and uses a context-sensitive Inspector palette to change an item's properties.

Pages are rendered inside Sandvox using WebKit, so you can click a headline to change it in place and not have to worry about jumping to Safari for a preview. An earlier version also introduced reuse of the WebKit installed with Safari 3, so you know you're seeing things as they'll appear in the latest version. This is of little concern if you stick to the design templates, but it's handy if you upgrade to the Pro version as it can insert entire pages or snippets of raw HTML into a site.

Pagelets remain Sandvox's best feature. They're widgets that add rich content to a page as a sidebar item or as a callout. Many embed content from other sites, such as your Amazon wish list or public photos on Flickr, and the range has been expanded. The new YouTube pagelet is especially welcome for bloggers, but there are some surprising omissions. Most notably, there's no pagelet to display your last.fm playlist, nor is there one to show your Facebook status, something that you'll find on dedicated blogging platforms. Other pagelets are geared towards improving a visitor's experience, such as one that maintains a list of links in the sidebar that link to blog posts by month.

iWeb 08's ability to add snippets of HTML encroaches on this territory in a more generalised fashion. Shelling out for the Pro version of Sandvox adds the same capability, but the price is a little too close to iLife 08 for comfort. iWeb also gives you much more creative freedom to customise page layouts, adding text boxes, images and other elements wherever you like.

However, pagelets are appealing because they add rich content to your site in an abstracted manner. There's no need to handle code, as configuration is handled through the form-like Inspector, and they're available in the reasonably priced standard version. Sandvox also gets one up on iWeb by treating sites as documents, which make it much easier to work on multiple sites.

We encountered a problem with the markers feature. When made visible, small green markers appear on the page wherever a caption can be inserted - typically, next to a pagelet. We tested this on a couple of Macs without success. Clicking them made the marker disappear, but any text we typed simply didn't appear.