Publisher Master is the ultimate graphic design and page layout platform -- easy and intuitive, yet powerful enough for design pros. Creating stunning designs is a snap. With Publisher Master, you can make posters, flyers, menus, brochures, greeting cards, booklets, pamphlets, postcards, and much more.
Share: Every web designer needs a decent program to succeed in their career and create a unique reputation for their design products. And sometimes, what’s working perfectly on PC, will not do the same for Mac users. Thankfully, today Mac fans don’t have any issues with that as there are tons of web design tools right at their fingertips. However, the prices often leave much to be desired which makes beginners struggle to do their work and improve their skills on a daily basis. So below we have compiled the best free web design software for Mac well-suited or especially created to be used on MacOS – they are free-based, simple enough and of high quality. Test any of these tools as long as you wish with the option to upgrade to pro version or purchase a full package of additional features in case you feel like it. Freeway Express is a simple and attractive web design tool for MacOS that is based on DTP (Desktop Publishing) application meaning you can build websites using a famous drag-and-drop builder and pre-made templates.
But what makes Freeway Express even better, is the ability to create a website from scratch without being limited by templates’ paucity. With its Master Page feature, you can easily set up your logo, navigation menu and footer as no-change items which will save you lots of time and nerves. So every time you create a new page, Master Page tool will automatically put your pre-set content in the right place. Features:. Standard-compliant HTML generation.
Master page content. Ability to publish to a local folder, FTP or MobileMe. Built-in WebKit preview and one-click preview in multiple browsers. Editable graphic text with an ability to create GIFs.
Automatic email address. Convenient table layout Mobirise is an awesome mobile-friendly software system well-suited for both non-techies and professional web developers. This free web design software for Mac has a unique minimalistic interface making the workflow easy and intuitive.
Create stunning websites, landing pages, online resumes and with tons of site blocks and pre-made templates available completely free of charge. To give your website more individual look, you can customize its flexible layout according to your needs – just drag-and-drop website blocks around as you wish. As Mobirise is based on a famous Bootstrap framework, be sure your website will look amazing whatever device it is viewed on. With additional Mobirise features like eCommerce tool, code editor and lots of extensions, you are all set to design an astonishing website with maximum performance and unique personality. Features:. Drag-and-drop website builder interface. Wide selection of beautifully designed blocks and elements.
Responsive design built on the Bootstrap Framework. Variety of extensions and pre-designed templates. Shopping cart and advanced eCommerce tool.
Mobirise code editor (for additional fee). Ability to preview your work at any point In case you came here looking for a coding software, Coffee Cup will certainly be of a great interest to you. With its flexible and simple workspace, this offline tool is perfect for hand-coding enthusiasts – both for hobbyists and professional web designers. Use Coffee Cup’s awesome features like pre-built templates, multiple cursors, tag matching and auto-suggest tool to the fullest to build a website easily and rapidly. However, regardless of its nice and convenient interface, absolute novices might find Coffee Cup a bit harder to adapt to than they have expected. Features:. Fully customizable toolbars.
Responsive templates and layouts. Pre-built form items. Website projects to organize your data. Automatic coding. Preview in any popular browser ToWeb is another easy-to-use, comprehensive and web design software for Mac which will satisfy both beginner and advanced users.
If your primary goal is to build a responsive website with a little to no knowledge of a coding alphabet, then ToWeb has everything you need. Simply download the app to your Mac, install it and start creating a website.
Pre-made templates are there to help you find the right look and feel so choose the one that suits the best and customize it the way you want. The tool supports all kinds of web pages, be it a photo gallery, Google maps or a video presentation. Another valuable feature ToWeb owns is a powerful e-commerce engine that helps to sell your products along with managing the whole process of purchase – shopping carts, taxes, payments etc.
Features:. Pre-designed website templates. Live Content Editing (WYSIWYG). CC3 based theme editor.
eCommerce tool So let’s say you are finished with creating and editing your stunning website and now it’s time to test how it’ll work on a real web server. To purchase a hosting account just for the sake of testing would not be beneficial at all, so let’s consider other option – MAMP ( stands for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP). It’s an awesome web design software that lets you install a web server locally to test and analyze the live performance of your website. So after you completed all the basic work, put your site through MAMP system to make sure it operates flawlessly and causes no bugs. Features:. Configuration of virtual hosts.
Mobile website testing. Dropbox Support. Apache, Nginxs, MySQL, PHP, Python, Perl, Web Start To enhance your website’s personality, you’ll need to add an attractive and eye-catching visual content like images, animations and photos. And in case Photoshop is not your closest friend, GIMP’s simplified yet powerful interface will guide you through the whole process of photo editing. This free web design software has tons of features similar to Photoshop meaning you’ll have nearly all the power of the famous Adobe product at your disposal and, of course, completely free of charge. Features:.
Customizable interface. Photo enhancement and digital retouching. Hundreds of plug-ins available at GIMP plugin registry.
Works with a huge number of formats. Supports pressure- and tilt-sensitive graphic tablets KompoZer is the only web design tool that matches Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG layout functionality. This awesome freeware is built on the NVU architecture and equipped with powerful HTML validator and CSS editor to control all the design process in one place.
With WYSIWYG feature, advanced file management through FTP and other useful functionalities, KompoZer deservedly occupies the place in the list the best free web design software for Mac users. Features:. FTP site manager. Great color picker. CSS editor. Customizable toolbars. Automated spellchecker.
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 automatically switch up your layout to look good on a widescreen monitor, a tiny smartphone, or anything in between.
While no single program currently offers all the power, flexibility, and simplicity I’d hoped for, I did find two particularly strong contenders that at least came within shouting distance of that ideal. Top choice for complete beginners: Blocs If you have no idea how to start building a site, start with ( ). At $70, it’s $10 cheaper than most of the other programs in this roundup. And thanks to its extensive library of well-crafted chunks of code, it makes assembling an impressively slick site almost as simple as snapping together a pile of Lego blocks.
Even before you begin, Blocs has done the hard work for you, building snippets of sample code that you can mix, match, customize, and stack. Just pick a clearly color-coded section of your design—header, body, or footer—and choose a chunk of layout to add, whether it’s a fancy screen-filling photo, a few columns of text, or a swath of smaller icons or images. Once it’s in place, you can tweak the template to suit your needs. At every turn, Blocs tries to sweat the small stuff so you don’t have to, including a navigation menu that’ll automatically update as you add new pages to your site. Spartan but clear thumbnails help you choose which chunk to add next, and accurately represent what you’re getting. While you’re limited largely to that ready-made collection, Blocs offers a wide enough selection of appealing elements to build an appealing site.
And since all the code’s prebuilt, every site you make in Blocs has responsive design support baked in, without any extra effort on your part. The sample site I built looked great on big and small computer screens, good on my iPad, and decent enough on my iPhone 5S. Blocs: A few quick clicks let you drop in predesigned, customizable chunks of your new webpage. Blocs’ balance between a sparse selection and effective results also applies to its feature set, including a limited but appealing roster of fonts, and its extremely basic control over text styling and padding. That deliberate simplicity helps keep new users from getting overwhelmed, and further flattens out the already gentle learning curve. Blocs’ stark, dark design departs from Mac conventions, and some aspects take a little time to learn.
Instead of bringing up contextual menus, right-clicking brings up a palette of individual page elements you can add to the existing code. Placing objects on the page can occasionally feel a tad squirrely, though it’s easy to undo mistakes or move a misplaced item. Blocs is a work in progress, and its creator’s laid out an ambitious, intriguing slate of potential upgrades. For now, Blocs sets modest goals, but carries them out impressively well. Top choice for everyone else: EverWeb If you know just enough HTML and CSS to get yourself in trouble, trust ( ) to keep you out of it. It’s more flexible and freeform than Blocs’ do-it-for-me simplicity, and it’s full of thoughtful tricks to help users get around the program’s own limitations.
When creating a site, you can choose from an extensive slate of great-looking, up-to-date templates, or start from scratch. Like Pages, EverWeb lets you draw text and image boxes or other shapes directly onto your page, then position and style them as you wish. I liked the program’s clean design and well-crafted interface. It lacks a grid or guides to keep your page tidy, but EverWeb will automatically or manually align elements by their edges or centers. The layout engine sometimes had trouble accurately aligning full-width elements, but otherwise proved fun and responsive.
EverWeb offers more options for CSS styling than Blocs; it won’t give you precise control of every element, but it provides enough choices to make a nice-looking site. Top-notch prebuilt widgets, including image sliders, image galleries, navigation menus, and more, are easy to edit and customize, and they yield great results. I was particularly impressed with the PayPal widget, which lets you build a full-featured online store with minimal time and effort—an ability most rivals either don’t offer or charge extra for.
While it doesn’t offer precise CSS styling, EverWeb’s options are still good enough to make a slick, modern-looking site. Rather than supporting responsive design, EverWeb provides mobile versions of many templates, and builds in an easy way to redirect mobile users to those pages from their desktop counterparts. That solution gobbles extra server space and bandwidth, but can also be less hassle than trying to reconfigure the same design to fit different-sized screens. Other clever workarounds let you expand EverWeb’s font roster with your own picks, a feature found in too few of its competitors. The code EverWeb produced was somewhat messy in the version I tested, though by the time you read this, an update promising sleeker results may be available. Still, I enjoyed EverWeb’s terrific balance between friendly design and a robust feature set.
Top contenders Macaw ( ) talks a big game but doesn’t entirely deliver. Aimed at high-end pros, it offers more power and flexibility than any other program here.
However, it’s also the most intimidating and frustrating app of the bunch, in part because it feels only half-finished. Macaw excels at its finer points. You can tweak nearly every CSS style attribute via well-designed palettes, and build custom style classes to apply to any element on your page. Smart scripting support lets you drag in existing variables and color swatches as you write your code.
And only Macaw offers pixel-precise control over responsive design, letting you set breakpoints at multiple screen widths, then rearrange your design to best fit each one. But while it gets the little things right, Macaw seems to struggle with the big ones. I found layout exasperating, as if the program were always fighting me. The help files are sometimes confusing and often incomplete—bad news for a program as dense as this one. You can only add to its limited list of fonts by paying for a subscription to Adobe Typekit.
And rather than focusing on fixing these gaps in the existing version, Macaw’s creators seem instead to be working on its new sibling, Macaw Scarlet, which promises even more sophisticated features. RapidWeaver If you just want to pour your content into a limited set of sharp-looking templates, with responsive design already built in, ( ) will work great. This powerfully extensible program can do far more than that, too‑but you’ll have to pay a good deal extra to unlock its full potential. RapidWeaver’s by far the best choice here for building a blog or a podcast, with excellent, easy support for adding new entries and episodes.
But I didn’t like how it forced me to flip back and forth between the raw content on my pages and a full preview of how they’d look online. If you want to branch out beyond its small slate of templates, keep your wallet handy. The app’s online market of powerful plugins offers tons of new capabilities and professionally designed themes. But their considerable cost could quickly add up to more than you paid for RapidWeaver itself. The rest of the pack Sandvox ( ) loses points for its limited customization and big but outdated selection of designs. However, it’s delightfully easy to use, including a super-simple integrated hosting service that seems fairly priced for what it offers.
And changing the whole look of your site is as easy as choosing a new template. I think Sandvox would make a great choice for teachers and students, or for parents who want to help their kids build a fun, basic site. Sparkle ( ) is a perfectly respectable app that unfortunately gets outshined by EverWeb, which feels like Sparkle’s very similar-looking but ultimately superior cousin.
I give Sparkle kudos for at least trying to make it easy to add third-party web fonts, even if the execution’s a little clunky. Its preset page sizes for responsive design also work better in concept than reality. Sparkle could become a real gem, but it needs more polish first. Freeway Express Living up to its name, ( ) is free. And if you endure its labyrinthine help files, you can build some nifty things relatively quickly. But its cluttered interface can prove frustrating, and it renders pages with such sorely outdated techniques—years behind every other app here–that you’re probably better off avoiding it.
A paid pro version offers a much more power and sophistication, but also costs a whopping $150. Bottom line Text editors are cheap or free, as are resources to teach yourself HTML, CSS, and jQuery—all more intuitive than they sound, even for non-geniuses. But that education demands dedication, time, and persistence, especially since today’s cutting-edge code quickly becomes tomorrow’s cobweb-covered embarrassment.
If you’d rather opt out of that Red Queen’s race, you’ll at least have a few good choices, whether you pick Blocs’ sleek simplicity or EverWeb’s user-friendly flexibility. I suspect Mac users will have even better, more complete options for building websites in a year or two. But for now, those two are the best of the bunch.