I use Sandvox a lot. This site is built with it. I really love it.
Er. Well. Most of the time...
Over the years, I've used everything from Dreamweaver to Wordpress (free and hosted), Pagespinner to SBI, all kinds of blog platforms, free website builders, the works. All have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are better for some jobs than others. All have their hinks and kinks, too.
But in my considered opinion, the best, easiest and fastest-to-master website building solution for most people – particularly those who aren't and don't want to be techies – is Sandvox. Plain and simple. It rocks.
I think it's so cool, that even if you're a PC person, or a person who's been on the fence about whether to buy a Mac or not, this might well be the one program that makes the decision for you. At least it would for me!
All that being said, Sandvox it is not a "perfect program." Such things are in the realm of myth. I doubt they exist. As far as it goes, the good folks at Karelia go to great lengths to support their baby, nurture it an help it grow up strong and healthy. That's a lot more than can be said for many other programs out there – including ones by some of the big boys!
There are features I'd like to see added to Sandvox, and that's what this page is about.
I'll be adding to this list as time goes on, and ammending it as Karelia upgrades their excellent piece of software. If you are a Sandvox user, please contribute to this page! Tell me what you'd like to see, and I'll add it to the list. Maybe if enough of us raise hell (ahem), we can get Karelia to implement our wish list!
• Twitter Pings and Self-Referential URL Shortening
As far as Twitter goes, the dream would be to have a way to auto post to Twitter in the same way as can often be done in WordPress. Beyond this, providing us with a Pretty Link-style URL shortener would be ideal. If you don't know, all those link shortening services (bit.ly, tinyurl, etc.) are useless for SEO. In fact, beyond that... they're counterproductive. When you use one of those services, guess what happens? Google sees links in your tweets pointing to those services, not back to your site (or wherever it is you're sending a reader). Needless to say, this is not good.
Sadly, with the relatively small Sandvox user base (which, additionally, is not all that SEO savvy anyway), the odds of Karelia implementing such features (I should think) are slim and none! This leaves us with using TwitterFeed for autopinging to Twitter, which in my experience is not all that reliable. Sigh.
The workaround I'm contemplating for several of my Sandvox sites is to have the actual blog portion of the site be in WordPress. A pain in the butt, to be sure... but perhaps the only way to get there from here.
• Variable Header Art
Sandvox's hallmark is (relatively) robust simplicity. And that's really cool. But sometimes it's not cool. With Sandvox, the header art you have is the header you get across the entire site. On many Designs (i.e. templates) you can modify the basic header with your own, like I've done here (the artwork at the top of this page). But there are times when you'd like to have a different Header for specific pages or sections of the site. It would be great if Karelia could give us this capability.
• Better Typography Controls
One of my pet gripes with Sandvox is that you're stuck with the linespacing they want you to have. I've literally seen situations on some templates where the line spacing on smaller type in sidebars is greater than the linespacing on bigger type in the main column (like this one). It's whacky! It leads to some bad looking pages.
And it needs to be addressed. Now, I'm not a programmer and I don't know all the stuff that's involved in dealing with this.
But as a long-time graphic designer and "typography whore," I'm forever shocked and amazed how little control we have in most web design apps over something as basic to graphic design as freakin' line spacing!
• Better HTML Controls
In Wordpress, you've got much better WYSIWYG control over HTML than in Sandvox. This has long been a problem and I hope they address it soon.
• Pagelets You Can Turn On and Off
Sometimes, you've got a Pagelet you don't want running everywhere it appears. It would be really great if there was simply a toggle that allowed you to turn Paglets on and off.
• Direct Twitter/Facebook/Social Media Integration
Like it says. We need this. Bare minimum would be integration with a feed aggregator like Ping.fm.
• The Ability to Copy Pagelets
One thing that's fairly irritating is having pagelets which do not necessarily flow down from Collections, but which you would like to have here and there in the site. It would be really great if you could simply "Copy Pagelet" and paste it onto another page somewhere! If ind that quite often I have to laboriously cut-and-paste the body of pagelet into another, and then do the same for the headline. It's not a big deal, but it does get old...
• Automatic Backups
One of the many great features of Sandvox is that it takes Snapshots everytime you save. If you find yourself in a place you don't like, you can revert to your Snapshots and go back to a place where you were happy. You can also have the program do a Backup of the site everything you open it. Both of these things are fine and good and I'm glad Sandvox has them.
But despite this fact – and despite the fact I'm one of those guys who saves frequently and often (years of working with flaky graphics programs, huge files and frequently under-powered machines instilled this habit) – it still find that I lose work in Sandvox occasionally!
Ugh.
I mean, I'll be doing something, make some changes, be in another program and... frack! The computer gets wonky, or Sandvox crashes, or something. Not good.
I would like to see Sandvox implement a periodic Snapshot/Backup as many programs are doing these days. You know, every 15 minutes or so it saves everything that hasn't been saved since the last time and puts it aside (this would reduce or prevent the lags a full save might do). In any event, I feel Sandvox desperately needs this kind of feature!
• Scheduling Future Blog Posts
One thing that would be really handy is being able to set up a blog post, set it for a future date, upload it... and have it appear then. I believe you can do this in Wordpress, but I'm not sure it's even possible with Sandvox, given that the shootin' match doesn't reside on your server. It would be really cool though...