Despite some obvious examples for Mac users, Blocs website builder is hardly a better alternative to cloud-based platforms. It is far from being cost-effective considering high prices to build and publish a website from scratch. At the same time, newbies will find the editing tools too complicated. Another huge drawback is the necessity of using CMS. The Complete Guide To The Best Free & Premium Web Design Software & Tools To Help You Create / Edit Your Website. For most people, the thought of designing your own website or doing anything web development related is a daunting and scary task, especially if you’re new to all this internet stuff. A crowded slate of Mac apps aim to make building a full-featured, modern website drag-and-drop simple. Many even support one of the most crucial new web trends: responsive design, which can. (Mac users can also create books using iPhoto.). It's best for those who have time and patience, or a strong desire to make their books just so. The best and worst photo-book-making sites.
You know what I miss? Photo albums. I miss flipping through their pages to rediscover memories, and slotting in new pictures. For all the convenience of instant uploads and sharing, my interaction with cloud-stored pictures tends to dissolve right after the first time I upload and share. (A November 2014 survey by self-publishing site Shutterfly suggests the same.)
That's why, for me, a photo book or calendar or heck, even a mug customized with someone's mug on it, makes the perfect gift, a way to hold on to those memories just a little bit longer.
I make a fair number of these little gifts using online services. I thought I'd share my experiences with four publishing sites that I've successfully used for creating photo books: Shutterfly and Mixbook for straightforward photo items; Blurb for a text-heavy book; and Pint Size Productions for the cooing, diapered crowd. I usually stick with the desktop sites, though most also have streamlined mobile apps as well. (Mac users can also create books using iPhoto.)
Just a note that since I first published this piece, some prices have gone up. Best photo album software free. Keep an eye out for frequent deals. And as always, feel free to jump in with favorites and perspectives of your own.
Disclaimer: CNET may get a share of revenue from the sale of the products featured on this page.
1. Shutterfly: The classic
Shutterfly was the first digital service I ever used to store my pictures in the cloud. These days, I turn to it more for photo gifts. It has an extensive offering that ranges from books and calendars to stationary and candles: basically anything you can slap a picture on.
Design options
If you start on the Custom Path, you'll have over 200 themes to choose from and up to six different cover choices (including leather and crushed silk), while Simple Path has about 20 template styles options and keeps the covers simple.
Ease of use
This website is more visually confusing than other sites, and you have to choose from various options right off the bat. The easiest one auto-fills photos for you, which you can move around the pages at will. You can loop in photos from sites like Picasa and Facebook, as well as from your computer. Once the photos are in, it's easy to change the layout for the entire book. You can open a bird's-eye view to swap pictures, though dragging and dropping them around would be easier still.
Simple Path is more constraining. You won't be able to change photo sizes or layouts, though you can remove and rotate pictures. You can convert Simple Path to a custom book through drop-down controls, which saves you from reuploading your snaps.
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The custom track is infinitely more flexible, with page embellishments and red-eye reduction, plus photo effects you can apply onscreen. There are also controls for spacing and layering objects, and you can open a separate view to change layout elements like image size and the number of photos per page.
It takes awhile to become familiar with the more complicated options on the customized route. It's best for those who have time and patience, or a strong desire to make their books just so.
Price
Photo books range from about $13 (all sums before tax and shipping fees) to $70 for the default number of pages (20). Shutterfly's additional pages range from 65 cents per page for the two smallest book sizes, up to $2.29 per page for the largest. In most cases, you pay a lit more for custom covers.
Yea or nay?
The hardcover photo books I've ordered have lived up to their promise, including durable paper as a standard feature. Reorders are a snap, too, since Shutterly saves all your past projects back to 1999. Despite the highest cost to create longer books and old-school navigation, Shutterfly is great for all levels.
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2. Mixbook: The new kid
Mixbook has a more modern website than Shutterfly's, but also has fewer options. In addition to books, you can make calendars and cards.
Design options
The roughly 200 themes to choose from are broken down into categories.
Ease of use
The site is cleaner to behold and easier to navigate than Shutterfly's in terms of narrowing down designs by category. Adding photos is as simple as dragging and dropping from your computer, though you can upload and auto-fill as well. From the desktop site, you can upload photos directly from your computer or through third-party services.
I do like how clearly marked tabs make changing layouts and backgrounds extremely simple, and backgrounds and stickers are modern and attractive.
One edge that Mixbook has is an ability for multiple collaborators to edit, which is useful if photos are spread out among family members or friends.
Price
Ranging from $16 to $70, Mixbook's prices edge Shutterfly's, and ordering extra pages is more economical. (Deluxe covers will cost much more, of course.) Additional pages are cheaper than Shutterfly's, ranging from 50 cents per page to $1.50 per page for the largest.
Yea or nay?
The photo books look good, though you'll need to pay attention to full-bleed photos whose edges will be obscured in a gutter. The title on the front cover of my book came out darker than I expected, and was shifted more to the left than I thought. Reorders and edits are straightforward after you log back in to your account. Overall, Mixbook's smoother creation experience and competitive prices make it a winner. 3. Blurb: The overachiever
Blurb is a site for the more serious self-publisher. I turned to it when making a memory book that was almost more text than pictures. Blurb was the most flexible of the bunch in terms of large swaths of text. It also turned out to be the most frustrating to use.
Design options
When it comes to luxury paper choices, Blurb has the competition trounced. You can download graphical themes in free packs of 20, but by default you're literally working with a blank canvas. Plenty of templates help you get started on layouts, and there are tools for drawing and adding text much like a more traditional desktop publishing app.
Ease of use
The most powerful tool for those who want to control every detail, Blurb is also by far the hardest for casual book-makers to use. You start by downloading a separate app, BookWright, for Mac or the PC (or install the Blurb plug-in for desktop apps like InDesign). After that, placing words and art are up to you. You can insert photos from your computer, but there's no integration with third-party photo sources.
The biggest problem for my book of short stories and memories was in formatting the text to make it fit just so. Any update to the text also changed the ways the words laid out on the page. This made copy editing and proofreading frustratingly slow.
On the plus side, you can easily create a PDF or an e-book for the iPad.
Price
If you're choosing fancy paper, prices can skyrocket, but for the more basic binding, you're looking at $13 for a 7x7 softcover book of 20 pages, up to $50 for a 13x11-inch book, this time with a hard cover.
Yea or nay?
This was the only service I found that gave me the flexibility to make the text-heavy mix of stories and captioned photos that I wanted.
However, my Blurb book arrived with unwelcome surprises. A small logo at the top and bottom of each page wound up in an unfortunate position in one full-page photo. Worst of all, an entire text section I wrote where the book jacket would go was absent in the final copy. If you want to replace the logo with your own, it'll cost you extra. Online reorders are accessible from your dashboard after logging in.
4. Pint Size Productions: The niche
This company's photo books are as niche as they are adorable. Baby-friendly board books for the dribblers in your life are small and grub-resistant.
Design options
Figuring out the differences between 'custom' and 'build-your-own' board books is the first step in getting what you want out of Pint SizeProductions' thick cardboard photo books for young'uns. Beyond that, you can customize a Sandra Boynton spread with your kiddo's name and face, or choose from various templates.
Ease of use
Simple in theory, using the rudimentary online upload tools to build this book seems low-tech and tedious, but you willingly struggle through because the result is so heart-warming. First, you have to choose your size and enter your ZIP code. Then, you wade through a lot of confusing directions that you'll later have to follow to a T or else lose all your work and have to start again.
Adding and resizing photos is relatively direct after that and, depending on which layout you choose, there are a few extra tools to arrange images.
Price
With fewer pages, you'll likely spend less overall than you would on larger productions. However, you might wind up paying the same price in shipping as you would for a basic book. Prices run as low as $6 and as high as $35, depending on the blank book template you choose. Sussing out what's what can be confusing and frustrating, and you can also buy premade templates (for a lot more), which you semi-customize with adorable personal photos.
Yea or nay?
I'm a huge fan of these board books for the babies in my life. They're cute and sweet and can take a beating or drooling where more delicate pages might become soggy or rip. As I mentioned above, the creation process can be a headache, and if you make a mistake, you might lose all your uploads and captions.
You'll be able to reorder books once you log in, though I only saw my most recent order when I checked; an online record of last year's book is nowhere to be seen.
Best Website Maker For BusinessHelpful tips to know
You can make photo gifts the easy way or hard way. Check out my best practices and tips in this how-to. Best compact printer scanner for mac.
Final thoughts
Photo products are expensive, and can run you more than $50 for a 20-ish page spread. Bespoke publishing is pricey to begin with, but the real nut of the issue is that these companies know you'll dig deep into your pocket to get something as personal and intimate as the labor of love you've just made.
The good news? There are deals all the time, especially around national holidays. Even a 20-percent-off deal or a free-shipping code can make a difference in your final bill, so let those promo emails flow!
If you've got any tips or thoughts of your own on making photo books, chime in below.
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Anyone with a text editor, a good grasp of HTML and CSS, and enough time on their hands can create a beautiful website. But what if you don't have time to brush up on your coding skills? What if squinting at a page full of code makes your head hurt? Or what if you're, you know, lazy?
A bumper crop of Mac apps has sprung up to help people in just such a predicament, applying a friendly front end and familiar tools to the ever-more-complicated word of web coding. While none of the three polished apps we review here will be perfect for everyone, chances are that one of them has the right feature set to fit your needs. Best wireless bluetooth speakers for mac music.
TurboWeb
Though it's by far the least expensive option in this roundup — roughly $60 cheaper than its two rivals! — TurboWeb packs an impressive amount of power for its low price. It offers a freeform, drag-and-drop interface for placing text, images, and more. I particularly liked the customizable grid and guides that let you impose some order on what might otherwise be chaos. Each element you place on the page snaps automatically to the nearest guide, or into alignment with neighboring elements.
Unique among this lineup, TurboWeb boasts a huge, searchable library of royalty-free stock photos — a big help for zero-budget designers who want to spice up an otherwise text-heavy site. I also enjoyed TurboWeb's instant access to my personal Pictures folder and iPhoto or Photos library. That said, you can't search through those libraries from within TurboWeb, so if you've got a pile of pictures on your hard drive, be prepared to do a lot of scrolling until you find the one you want. I also found it odd that I couldn't use any of the program's stock photos in its photo-carousel widget.
On the whole, TurboWeb does most of what you'd want it to perfectly adequately, including a bare-bones but functional way to upload your site to the FTP server of your choice (or sign up for TurboWeb's own recommended hosting provider). The online help files are simple but sufficient as well.
Nonetheless, TurboWeb fell short in a few key areas. I couldn't get text to wrap around an image for the life of me. I couldn't create a button with different active, hover, or default states. TurboWeb's short list of font options can't be changed or expanded. Responsive design support — allowing you to display the same pages differently on devices with different-sized screens — was rudimentary at best; you can swap between desktop and tablet versions, but if you've finished creating one layout, you'll have to start all over from a blank page to create the other. And TurboWeb's ability to edit and apply custom classes is rudimentary at best. It applies only to text — not images, buttons, or anything else — and offers no control over margins or padding.
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EverWeb
Like TurboWeb, EverWeb offers a similar drag-and-drop interface (albeit without the handy grid or guides) and overall feature set, with the same limitations when it comes to customizing CSS style elements on your pages. And it shares TurboWeb's somewhat clunky approach to 'responsive design,' requiring you to create a whole separate set of mobile counterpart pages to those on your desktop site. It lacks TurboWeb's sizable stock image library, but makes up for it by automatically supporting any of Google's extensive library of free fonts, once you've downloaded and installed them on your Mac. So why should you even consider shelling out $60 more than TurboWeb for EverWeb?
First, EverWeb boasts outstanding help files, including an extensive and well-written manual running more than 100 pages, along with handy video tutorials available right from the app's opening screen.
Second, EverWeb's publishing tools are somewhat more robust, with more options for FTP server info, and the ability to add custom header/footer code and even a favicon for your site.
And finally — and perhaps most importantly, if you need it — EverWeb builds in the ability to set up a basic online store, including buy buttons and a shopping cart, using PayPal. Few other web design apps offer anything like this — neither TurboWeb nor Blocs do — and those that do often charge extra for the privilege.
With the few exceptions I've noted, like TurboWeb's searchable stock photo database, EverWeb does basically everything that TurboWeb does, but just a little bit better. However, unless you want to set up your own online store quickly, easily, and inexpensively, EverWeb may not be better enough to merit paying four times TurboWeb's price.
![]() Blocs
Packed with powerful but friendly features, and getting better all the time, Blocs is the app I wish I'd had back when I built sites for a living. Best slideshow maker for mac pro.
Rather than making you build a site from scratch, Blocs offers prebuilt page elements that you can quickly stack atop each other. Once you've roughed out the overall look of your page, it's easy to customize its content and fine-tune its appearance. Switching into 'drop mode' brings up a searchable palette of individual elements — buttons, headers, etc. — that you can place within the prebuilt frameworks to further tweak them to your liking.
Blocs boasts powerful control over CSS styles, including the ability to create custom classes and apply them to any element in your site. Tweak the custom class once — change the color from maroon to gold, for instance — and the change ripples through every element with that class, site-wide. And Blocs offers pinpoint precision over nearly every CSS style parameter you can think of, all in a clean, coherent interface.
Blocs' support for responsive design also leaves competitors eating its dust. Design a page for the desktop, and with one click you can see what it'll look like on tablets or phones, too. You can change elements of the design to improve its readability in one view without affecting how it'll look in the others. And you can even change or create custom classes specifically for phone or tablet pages as well. It's only fair to note that the sized-down versions of these pages don't always render on the actual devices exactly as they look in Blocs, but they tend to be close enough to fix with a little extra tweaking.
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Blocs also supports a few fancy bells and whistles such as video backgrounds. Adding Google web fonts to Blocs' menu is as easy as pasting in the right URL. And it's the only program in this lineup to include support for several popular free or paid content management systems, including October and Pulse. Blocs's excellent help files and video tutorials can show you how to quickly set up a Blocs page as a front end for database-driven content in these systems, among many other useful tips and tricks.
Blocs isn't perfect. It's the work of a single programmer, so you'll find a few hiccups, twitches, and glitches here and there. Its prebuilt components mean you won't be able to indulge your wildest flights of design fancy. And the earnest 'helpful hint' blurbs that pop up whenever you try something new in the program quickly start to feel a little too much like Microsoft's notorious Clippy. But on the whole, it's my favorite app in this roundup by far.
Free Website MakerWhich app is best?
If you just want an inexpensive way to build nice-looking, no-frills sites, TurboWeb's a solid bet. If you need to set up an online store without paying through the nose, consider EverWeb. But if you want to get the most bang for your buck, you can't beat Blocs.
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If we've overlooked one of your favorite apps for web design — or if you just want to gripe about how text editors are the only way to build sites — please let us know in the comments below.
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