A friend is trying to rebuild an old, relatively simple website. He is using a new application called Elements, which he says, “is the most user-unfriendly app that I have ever owned.” My friend is a Mac user, I believe Sequoia.
It’s been years since I built a site, using Joomla, which would not suit my friend. Any suggestions will be gratefully received.
Many thanks,
Howard
I HIGHLY recommend Elements. I find it to be truly excellent software. There is a learning curve though. Not just with the software itself, but to get familiar with common css stuff as well. I would recommend that he stick with it and spend the necessary time to learn it.
Are you talking about RapidWeaver Elements? If not, move on, nothing to see here.
I used RapidWeaver for years (starting with v3). In the early days it came with everything needed for websites in those days. As websites have become more complex, RapidWeaver allowed 3rd parties to sell plugins that were necessary to do anything. So the cost to use RapidWeaver/Elements was much greater than the initial purchase.
If you already use RapidWeaver/Elements continue to use it. If you have never used it look elsewhere.
I would look at Wordpress. Or hire someone else.
Thank you Steven and David. I’ve sent along your suggestions. Yes, I believe it’s an old version of RapidWeaver. I seem to recall that my friend was having difficult upgrading it. I don’t know the outcome.
RapidWeaver 8 still works with Sequoia and is not subscriptionware. Don’t upgrade!
Both pika.page and posthaven.com are good for very basic Web sites. Blogger, while outdated and basic, is serviceable and you can attach it to a domain.
I no longer recommend self-hosted WordPress; WordPress.com might be an option.
I have not tried it (yet) but https://alto.so purports to offer an app that can convert Apple Notes to very basic html Web sites. Your friend would want to have a clear navigation/page hierarchy in mind first.
Thank you Lisa. Yes, something basic is likely what they are aiming at. The website currently exists, but it hasn’t been updated in quite a while. I suspect they just want to spruce it up some.
To clarify, I assume this means the old site was built with the original Rapidweaver (Classic). Despite what Realmac has stated, I don’t see a future for the Rapidweaver Classic app. Plugin developers have been dropping off since the introduction of Elements, and it’s difficult to see a future for the old app.
They have thrown the kitchen sink at Elements. It promises a lot and is undoubtedly a more modern tool using newer technologies. Unfortunately this meant a total redesign, and a steep learning curve for anyone using the Classic app. I was in the first beta group and was hopeful it would be a major step forward. In my opinion, and of course your milage may vary, it sadly missed the mark of being a ‘simple’ web site builder. Whilst you can create a very basic site with a pre-built template, any sort of finesse will lead to quite a bit of frustration as you try to get your head around the new interface. It also requires an understanding of modern web components; grids vs flex, containers vs sections vs scaffolding etc — little of which is clearly explained in the tutorials.
If you have a lot of time to invest — and I’m not sure someone trying to quickly rebuild an old, basic website will — I’m sure a great site could be put together.
I applaud their efforts to dive into the new web world, but in making so many parameters editable, they’ve generated a level of complexity which goes against the premise of ‘simple’. Add to this having to carefully manage responsiveness, and it can be overwhelming.
There’s also a number of options which requite additional payment (better galleries, better blog etc) which means its initial price may not get you the features you need.
If it was me, I’d probably take the advice of an earlier poster and look at Wordpress. No initial outlay and relatively easy to drive once you get the hang of it. The simple themes are quite easy, and there are a million tutorials on the web and youtube,
I really wanted to love Elements, but I don’t enjoy it at all.
Update from friend:
“Yes, I have Rapid Weaver Elements. As the first responder said - there is indeed a learning curve! No manual, so one has to guess and go by trial and error. And it is extremely complicated, making it hard to remember the different things that worked.”
I now have a feeling that building a website is no longer a do-it-yourself endeavor.
TD;DR: This has been my feeling for several years now. The days of hand coding HTML are in the distant past and even the simple days of iWeb are gone.
Before I updated one of my sites (in 2025), I looked at several web site builders. I didn’t find any of them intuitive or easy to use. So I went back to RapidWeaver v8, bought Stacks and a photo gallery plugin to approximate what I had been able to do easily with RapidWeaver v5 and the free RapidAlbum plugin.
What I was able to do in RapidAlbum in minutes took me hours in the modern plugins. That’s progress? I engaged in a lengthy and friendly back-and-forth email discussion with a RapidWeaver developer and he advised me to look elsewhere for new projects but to stick with RapidWeaver for existing projects.
Edit: After browsing the RapidWeaver Classic vs. RapidWeaver Elements page I see that Elements eliminates the need for stacks. That’s good. On the other hand, Elements cannot import Classic projects. That’s not good.
I really enjoyed building websites with Apple’s iWeb but it was a 32 bit app so would not work beyond Mojave. Unfortunately the web pages it created had lots of impenetrable code so was not easily ported to other web editors.
I still use SeaMonkey for maintaining numerous simple web pages that I started in the late 1990s. I use Transmit to upload edited pages. Both apps are fairly intuitive.
Well, er, you can still hand-code websites and it’s not necessary to include vast quantities of bells & whistles but you may not be enthusiastic about writing raw html. “Wait, what does <br> do?” Still, you can do it, and it will work and a simple announcement will be under 1K. (OMG!)
It’s interesting, though, that the market for easy website builders has cratered. You can get Adobe Dreamweaver ($23/mth !!!??) which is hugely sophisticated but the tier of useful website builders for modest cost seems to have disappeared.
If you want to build an e-commerce site, Squarespace is truly impressive and easy to use but it has a subscription cost.
I’ve not done a days-long examination of this (minutes, frankly 
) but it looks like WordPress really is an inexpensive, well-managed system that’s pretty easy to use and just right for a simple site.
Dave
Another early user and beta tester for Elements here. It’s very easy once the user understands how websites are built and the vocabulary in use etc. If you’re confident there then it’s an incredibly usable and approachable app.
I tend to point folks who aren’t confident to Wix and Squarespace. Hard to argue with them for easy website building.
Depending on the site and requirements, mainly informational, text and images etc they could build a site in Notion and publish there with their domain registration pointing to it. That’s even easier again.
Back in the early days I learned enough html 2/3/4 to do what I wanted to do with web sites, then started into adding CSS. Synced/uploaded all with Fetch. Dabbled in iWeb, Dreamweaver and something else. Took a hiatus.
Next time I looked, contemporary web sites were done with databases and much fancier than I needed and were over my head. I still have a couple of simple small informational ones done in html and when I need to modify them I can still with some html knowledge refreshing do it.
Most recently I installed WordPress and managed to learn it and do enough to set up again, a couple of simple informational sites. Maybe 2 years ago they changed the interface so drastically and introduced new panes, terminology and so on, it’s so bad I have great difficulty in making changes and learning how to use it.
Almost worse than that is finding a template. There must be thousands by now and their search feature imho is not useful. I’ve searched for, say, ‘white, clean, photo, blog’ and I get results that don’t even match that description and have to wade thru tons of results. So I gave up.
About a year ago I spent about two full days on the couch reading up on the latest html and css to create a site with mostly text, a few images, and it works ok on various sizes of displays.
Going from the concept of sites to be viewed on big computer screens with slow internet connections to now trying to build a site for viewing on that as well as small screens, fast internet, various browsers and all their tricks, is quite a change but as @Dafuki writes, simple html sites are still in 2026 valid and usable.
Anyway, ‘right tool for the job’ for OP would then seem to be to assess what is now, what the desired changes are, what audience and tech use wants/needs to be addressed and then, sounds to me like OPs friend might best grit the teeth and dive back into Elements to accomplish those changes.
According to a page at realmac, the ‘User Manual’ is not a pdf but a web page: Welcome | RapidWeaver Elements Docs
And on initial glance, doesn’t say what version is applies to, quite possibly not the Classic version but mayb still somewhat helpful, or maybe write them an email and ask if there is a pdf manual for the older version lurking somewhere. Maybe on the Wayback Machine.
Depending on how complex the site is and how often it needs to be updated, a static site generator might be an option. I use Hugo (https://gohugo.io) but there are others. As with basic use of Wordpress, you need to find a template that works for you, and there’s definitely a learning curve. Familiarity with Terminal and Git helps. But for some applications this is a very good option. I do use WP but for a lot of tasks it’s overkill.
I built a medical website dermmedicine.com around 1997-8 with a program Apple owned but I can’t remember its name. I’m sure it was a simple HTML generator, etc. But it was a WYSIWYG what you see is what you get type of program and it was loads of fun. Patrick
Charles Butcher Is Hugo a WYSIWYG type of builder? I like those but I haven’t built one in years. Patrick
We’re in the AI era.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - all offer AI based simple web site builders.
And there’s WIX too. One of the easiest to use.
If it was around 1997-8, then it was Claris Home Page. The final release was in 1998, but it really died in 2011 when OS X Lion dropped support for PowerPC applications.
I use SeaMonkey now instead.
Certainly…and perhaps that was a bit of hyperbole on my part 
Even though I use RapidWeaver, some of the pages are hand coded with simple html that I have ported over the years.