Last week, Sandvox was a runner up in Apple’s Design Awards, so I decided to take a look at it to re-create my website. I really like the look of the websites; they look more professional than the basic one’s created by RapidWeaver (which I’ve used for about 1.5 years). I spent about half a day yesterday reworking my ReceiptWallet website in Sandvox and am pretty pleased what I’ve done. I went to publish it to a test site and the demo limited me to publishing the main page, so I went ahead and purchased it (I had to purchase the Pro version for $79 as I have a few places that I have raw HTML) and proceeded to publish the full site. I use SFTP (secure FTP or FTP over SSH) to publish and kept getting errors about the encryption key. Not looking too hot for $79. After a few tries and changing some settings, I was able to publish the “full” site. I was about to switch my entire site over and make it live when I discovered that Sandvox only uploaded one of my graphics.
Wow, I’ve never had so many problems with one program in the first day of using it and having spent $79 on it, I’m a bit disappointed to say the least. I’ve spent them a few pieces of email and hopefully they’ll have a solution soon. For a product that has been out for over a year, it seems like it still needs a bit of work. There are a bunch of hidden features that really shouldn’t be hidden; for instance, I needed to change the file extension to .php from .html so that some of my PHP code would run which I could only do with a hidden preference; in addition, I wanted to change the Amazon associate ID to my own instead of theirs (at least I could do it).
I just discovered that they also embed a link to their Amazon associates stuff in my page that includes Amazon links; not cool at all.
So, at this point, my site remains unchanged and unimpressive. I also feel that I’ve wasted $79 on a piece of software that needs a ton of work. Oh well, live and learn.
That brings me to another complaint I have and that’s the Apple Design Awards; this year they recognized several web design applications that frankly look better than they function. So Apple Design Awards must really only recognize applications that look pretty. Am I disappointed that ReceiptWallet didn’t win? Yes, but now I understand why, it is extremely functional and doesn’t have fancy pictures to make up for its shortcomings. Another lesson learned, don’t waste time entering time year. Apple better send back my Pentax DSMobile 600 scanner I sent in with my entry to make judging it easier.