Karelia Community Forum

lulu

Member

Great Design Find!

I recently purchased the "Lake" design by Cristiano Maria Gaston, ( http://www.BehindTheRabbit.com ) and I am extremely pleased to have discovered this great designer. It gave my Sandvox website more class, if I may humbly say so. BehindTheRabbit website is very helpful and it's offerings are not expensive at all.

I discovered this Italian designer by accident, reading a user comment on Macupdate.com, and now I want to share this find with other Sandvox users.

Yes, I know BehindTheRabbit is listed among Sandvox Design Providers on Karelia's website, but I wish Cristiano were more active in the Sandvox Designs section of this Community…

lulu

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Interesting point, Joseph. That's what scares me a bit with third-party designers. Will they still be around two, three years down the road?

What happens if a third-party design becomes outdated, unsupported or incompatible with a Sandvox major upgrade? If I build a complex website based on a third-party design, what do I do if it's not updated or has disappeared in the wind? Of course, I'm not immortal myself but it's always good to plan ahead…

Do third-party designers make some sort of commitment with Karelia in terms of years?

Steven

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

That's a good point Lulu. I think its one of the weaknesses, template based programs have.

Steven

lulu

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

I agree with you Steven.

I will therefore ask my question again:

Does Karelia Software require some commitment from third-party designers? How can I be sure these designs will be appropriately maintained/updated for at least a few years? If so, how many years would that be?

DJohnson

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Good questions. With iWeb I for the most part stayed with Apple's designs because of the issues raised here. However, I did purchase an 11mystics design and support for that stopped.

I am very happy with my decision to use BehindTheRabbit's Lake (Graphite) design for the reasons that lulu spoke to, and hope that both work together into the future.

cucwebmaster

Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

Hi lulu,

I developed our original website with Blueball’s Trifecta.  Trifecta worked beautifully for our original website, users loved the look and Charlie Lockhart was most helpful if/when I had problems.

However, when Sandvox went to 2.x, Trifecta no longer worked.  Charlie Lockhart was unsure if/when he could make it work because of changes to Sandvox itself.  Since ours is a large website (600+ pages), if we had needed to quickly change over from a 3rd party design, it would have presented serious problems. 

However, because of a pastor’s pending retirement, I was already in the process of redesigning major portions of our website.  The fact that we had ample time to make the transition from a 3rd party design to a Sandvox design (Distinction) made a world of difference.  The change to Distinction worked well and with minimal problems.  There were minor issues along the way, but those were quickly resolved. 

I agree, there are some wonderful 3rd party designs available, but if the designer moves on or if a design is incompatible with Sandvox changes, you may face serious and time-consuming transition issues, especially with a large website.  Just something to keep in mind when you make your design decision.

Aloha,

Kerry

lulu

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Kerry,

Your story has a happy ending but it illustrates my anguish.

Sure, I have to be careful when I choose a third-party design but what can I do more other than trust Karelia's recommendation?

Steven

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Good questions. With iWeb I for the most part stayed with Apple's designs because of the issues raised here. However, I did purchase an 11mystics design and support for that stopped.

I am very happy with my decision to use BehindTheRabbit's Lake (Graphite) design for the reasons that lulu spoke to, and hope that both work together into the future.

Theres one plus in iWeb: its possible to make a site from scratch. You can use a basic template and rebuild it, even if you do know nothing about Html. If Sandvox has the possibility to do this it would be great. If they make one basic themplate that you simple can change and Karelia makes a tutorial / manual, how to work with html and css in Sandvox, than more users can make designs from that basic template and share it.

Steven.

JimK

Super Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

With Kerry's illustration, there is a simpler solution. Don't upgrade to Sandvox 2.x until the template supports it. While it may be nice to have some new functionality, it's probably not necessary. There was a lot changed under the hood between Sandvox 1 and Sandvox 2, and it broke a lot of the previous template functionality. That's my guess why you see some template developers hanging it up—the transition wasn't simple. In Blueball's case, Charlie appears to be working on migration of most of his popular templates—but it takes time and effort. I held off going to Sandvox 2 until Blueball's Cubicle was ready. I also worked with Karelia on beta testing my site to help them with debugging the new version of Sandvox.

Karelia does have a manual on how to code new Sandvox templates.

http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/help/z/S … Guide.html

If you're familiar with css and html, it's not hard to modify an existing template to suit your needs (especially for colors, font sizes, line spacing, etc.). Sandvox and the template 'process' brings a lot to the table—very fast updating and adding content to sites, ease of use, pretty rich set of features. If you need custom layout all the time, you might learn another program (like Freeway Pro) that allows you to develop pages in a page layout tool. It's great for custom sites, but it's (IMO) much harder to keep content fresh (which is why I migrated to Sandvox).

Jim

lulu

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Good questions. With iWeb I for the most part stayed with Apple's designs because of the issues raised here. However, I did purchase an 11mystics design and support for that stopped.

I am very happy with my decision to use BehindTheRabbit's Lake (Graphite) design for the reasons that lulu spoke to, and hope that both work together into the future.

Theres one plus in iWeb: its possible to make a site from scratch. You can use a basic template and rebuild it, even if you do know nothing about Html. If Sandvox has the possibility to do this it would be great. If they make one basic themplate that you simple can change and Karelia makes a tutorial / manual, how to work with html and css in Sandvox, than more users can make designs from that basic template and share it.

Steven.

That's a good idea, Steven. I remember that iWeb did indeed give you the flexibility to customize a template.

But I don't want to go through the hassle of coding html and css. I've done that with RapidWeaver and I really prefer to concentrate on content, not the inner plumbing.

Or maybe Sandvox could simply buy the best of third-party designs presently offered and integrate them in the Sandvox package... I would gladly pay a bit more for Sandvox if the included designs were nicer, and if I could thus have some assurance that these designs would be maintained/upgraded in the future. I love Sandvox but the provided templates are not very appealing (IMHO), although I have not tested them all...

DJohnson

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

As this post started off by speaking to Cristiano Maria Gaston's designs - http://www.BehindTheRabbit.com - I would also like to acknowledge and thank Cristiano for his good support of his designs - getting back to email & twitter questions very quickly and releasing updates where necessary (only one needed in the time that I have been using a BehindTheRabbit design). I have been using Lake (Graphite) and am very satisfied with the theme and support.

danwood

Administrator

Re: Great Design Find!

Do third-party designers make some sort of commitment with Karelia in terms of years?

I wanted to address this question.  No, there is no pledge or committment that third-party designers perform.  It's an interesting idea, but even if they did, would that really accomplish anything?  They could still drop support just as easily if they hadn't made some kind of commitment.

When designers sell their wares, they tend to work on the currently released version of Sandvox.  This could be applied to just about any third-party add-on creator: For instance, a manufacturer of iPod cases will create cases that work on the current generation of iPods, but due to changes in iPod design, those cases might not work on subsequent versions.

In the case of Suzanne/11Mystics, we continued to link to her designs for a while because they continued to work just fine with websites created with Sandvox 2 (though not able to take advantage of new Sandvox 2 features like drop-down menus).  However, we stopped linking to her products when we realized that she was really gone, and was not going to be able to support her products, answer requests for refunds, and so forth.

I, too, wish I knew what happened to her.  I'm not quite ready to panegyrize her, but for all I know, she is no longer with us on Planet Earth!

Blueball_Design

Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

Hi Everyone,

Just to follow up on some things asked and answered many times in the past regarding our Blueball Design updates for Sandvox 2, I am working through each one of them but it is a very time consuming process to do. I am currently working on our Blueball Pro Tabs design updates for Sandvox 2. Next up after that is our Trifecta designs update for Sandvox 2. We are at a standstill on any new Sandvox 2 design development while we have to complete the updates of our existing designs for Sandvox 2 which has been very frustrating to say the least.

Sometimes updating a design for Sandvox 2 has required me to pretty much rebuild the design over from scratch. Other times it goes much quicker with less to do to the existing design's various files. The older designs tend to require much more work then the later Sandvox 1.6 designs have required.

I am the oldest active Sandvox design developer and released our first Blueball Sandvox design a few month after Sandvox 1 was initially released. I have been in business a long time and have no plans to go anywhere regarding Sandvox design development and supporting our Blueball Sandvox designs for our buyers and users of our designs. We have always gone out of the way to help Sandvox users and our Blueball design users alike with answering questions and issues no matter what, and I can say we offer some of the best support to be found and stand behind all our design products.

Kerry, it has taken me a while to resolve the issues the Blueball Trifecta design layout had with Sandvox 2, and I am sorry to hear you had to move on to another design for your sites. The Trifecta update will fix all of them and add in all the Sandvox 2 features to the Trifecta design layout.

The Blueball Pro Tabs updates is well underway and should be wrapped up in a week or so. That update like all our other Blueball Sandvox 2 updates is free and will be emailed out to all buyers of earlier versions of the Pro Tabs design.

if anyone has any questions on our Blueball Sandvox 2 design updates, please email me at themesupport (at) blueballdesign (dot) com and I will get back to you. You can also follow us on Twitter at @blueballdesign for the latest news on our updates and releases.

Best,
Charlie

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Sandvox sites that get noticed use Blueball Sandvox Designs!
http://sandvoxdesigns.blueballdesign.com
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/blueballdesign

SteveMouzon

Super Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

Theres one plus in iWeb: its possible to make a site from scratch. You can use a basic template and rebuild it, even if you do know nothing about Html. If Sandvox has the possibility to do this it would be great. If they make one basic themplate that you simple can change and Karelia makes a tutorial / manual, how to work with html and css in Sandvox, than more users can make designs from that basic template and share it.

You can basically do that in Sandvox as well. I start all my sites with Clean Sheets. It's not completely a blank page, but it's close.

www.originalgreen.org
www.mouzon.com

more to come...

Steven

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Theres one plus in iWeb: its possible to make a site from scratch. You can use a basic template and rebuild it, even if you do know nothing about Html. If Sandvox has the possibility to do this it would be great. If they make one basic themplate that you simple can change and Karelia makes a tutorial / manual, how to work with html and css in Sandvox, than more users can make designs from that basic template and share it.

You can basically do that in Sandvox as well. I start all my sites with Clean Sheets. It's not completely a blank page, but it's close.

www.originalgreen.org
www.mouzon.com

more to come...

Hi Steve,

Sandvox is a good program, but it is for people without knowledge of HTML or CSS not flexibel enough. So we must have it from the templates offered by the designers. These are great, but the problem with themplates are: most of the build sites looke the same. If you looke on sandvoxsites.com you see what i mean. I think it would be nice tot have some kind of list, where you can find the code to make changes. (if you want to change font, you use this code)
(if you want to change the background colour, you use this code) etc, etc. Oke, iWeb has its weaknesses, but it is verry flexibel.

Steven

SteveMouzon

Super Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

Steven,

I share your concern, and have posted repeatedly here about it. I didn't want to learn HTML or CSS at all, as my bandwidth is seriously challenged already. But here's what I discovered about iWeb and Sandvox: whereas changing iWeb templates substantively is all but impossible for non-HTML people, it actually is possible with Sandvox if you learn a few things about CSS. The difference is that iWeb's templates, like all things Apple, are stunningly beautiful, beyond anything else out there. Sandvox's templates, while good, aren't at that level... nor is anyone else, for that matter. IMO.

georgewalker

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

I am actually quite confused in deciding which one is the best Sandvox or iWeb...Please provide me with a good suggestion so that I can clear my confusion..

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designer wedding dresses

JimK

Super Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

George,

iWeb has been deprecated by Apple, so Sandvox is better by default...  :-)

You can try Sandvox out as a trial, and that's what I would suggest. See if it works for you.

Jim

macbev

Member

Re: Great Design Find!

Good questions. With iWeb I for the most part stayed with Apple's designs because of the issues raised here. However, I did purchase an 11mystics design and support for that stopped.

I am very happy with my decision to use BehindTheRabbit's Lake (Graphite) design for the reasons that lulu spoke to, and hope that both work together into the future.

Theres one plus in iWeb: its possible to make a site from scratch. You can use a basic template and rebuild it, even if you do know nothing about Html. If Sandvox has the possibility to do this it would be great. If they make one basic themplate that you simple can change and Karelia makes a tutorial / manual, how to work with html and css in Sandvox, than more users can make designs from that basic template and share it.

Steven.

I wish it were possible to alter some of the elements in a Sandvox site - change the size or color.

SteveMouzon

Super Hero

Re: Great Design Find!

You can do that, but you have to know a bit of CSS. Either modify the style sheet or do code injection.