Sunset for Sandvox? Try EverWeb!
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Sunset for Sandvox? Time To Try EverWeb!

If you’re currently using Sandvox and have recently been on to their User Forums, you’ll no doubt be aware that there’s a complete lack of user support or information about the future of Sandvox from its publisher Karelia. There’s been no update to Sandvox either, except for macOS compatibility purposes, since 2017!

It’s a sad state of affairs and whilst Sandvox is undoubtedly a good product, even loyal followers are now looking for an alternative.

The Sandvox/EverWeb Comparison

If you compare EverWeb with Sandvox, you’ll find that the user interface experience of both products is in many ways similar. If you transitioned over from iWeb to Sandvox in the past, the move from Sandbox to EverWeb should be a similar experience. Whilst there is no direct way to convert a Sandvox website to another website building product, it should be straightforward to do with EverWeb.

EverWeb includes about 200 professionally designed Theme Templates for you to choose from, whilst Sandvox includes only 60 designs. You can, of course, create your own design using a blank template in both products if you prefer. As with Sandvox, EverWeb is a drag and drop website building product and you can also easily add HTML code and CSS classes in to your site if you want to. You’ll notice though that with Sandvox you can’t move objects freely around the canvas. You’re limited in this respect to moving objects within its template grids. With EverWeb can move objects anywhere on the page giving you complete design freedom.

Responsive Web Design
Creating a Responsive website in EverWeb is also easy as there are dedicated, feature rich theme templates and widgets (which are in some ways similar to ‘Objects’ in Sandvox) that do the hard work for you. This allows you the freedom to concentrate more on your site’s design and features! Using EverWeb’s Responsive design capabilities, you only need one page design that can be used on any device. Sandvox does not seem to include in-built support for Responsive design at all.

Adding E-Commerce To Your Site
If you want to add e-commerce to your site, EverWeb makes it easy. The built in PayPal widget is fully customizable allowing you to design the online shopping experience that you always wanted. As with other EverWeb widgets, the PayPal widget takes the hard work out of building your store so you will rarely need to go to PayPal itself to configure the features that your online store needs. If you don’t want to use PayPal, you can integrate other e-commerce providers if you want.

Social Media Support
Sandvox has a curious mix of social media tools, many of which appear to be years out of date. EverWeb, however, has a great mix of social media widgets and buttons. Easily add Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and many other social media tools to your EverWeb site.

Adding SEO To Your Site
Many websites want good SEO for better search engine results from a Google search. SEO is baked in to EverWeb. If you want to tune your SEO, just follow the EverWeb SEO video course!

Hosting Your Website
Both Sandvox and EverWeb include hosting options and this is a sensible to take up as it makes integration and ease of use a lot easier. EverWeb, for example, includes hosting specific options within the product itself. If you host with EverWeb you can add a Favicon to your site, setup a ‘404 page not found’ page, 301 page redirection, password protection for your website and the pages within it and there’s also an option to end to end data encrypt your website too with just a mouse click!

If you want to use your existing hosting provider that’s also no problem either. You can purchase EverWeb with or without hosting. The choice is always yours.

Product Updates
As I stated at the top of this post, Sandvox has been languishing since 2017. There have been no new feature additions added since that time. Sandvox’s core toolset and interface are way out of date. If you use EverWeb, you will enjoy new and updated features throughout the year. There’s always something new to improve your website and keep it always up to date with today’s technology.

You can try EverWeb for free. The demo version of the product is the full version except you can’t publish at all. If you decide to purchase you also have a 60 day money back guarantee built in. EverWeb is not a subscription service. When you buy, you get a year of product updates and 24×7 support. If at the end of the year you do not want to renew your product update and support plan that’s fine. You still keep the product that you originally purchased.

EverWeb’s also due to get a massive update in a few weeks with many new and exciting features, so now is a great time to try it out for yourself!

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4 Comments

  1. would like to move from Karelia to Everweb. Lost something in my username/password combo when Keeper stopped working foe me and haven’t been able to modify for some time. Is this a problem? Has been hosted by A2, domains w/ goDaddy

    1. Thanks for the question. Usually there will be a way in which you can recover your password. I assume the username/password you need to recover is for your GoDaddy domain? If this is the case you should be able to ask this directly from GoDaddy. Often when you try to log in to these kinds of services there is an option for ‘forgotten username/passwords’. In the meantime, you can still build a website in EverWeb as you can fill in your FTP details at a later date when you have recovered your GoDaddy username/password.

      Hope that helps!

  2. I purchased Everweb with the idea of using it instead of Sandvox. To my big surprise, it turns out Everweb does not have a photo album page that performs like the one in Sandvox and Iweb. Everweb has literally thousands of page templements, but none of those is a simple photo albums page that allows you to have photos AND VIDEOS on the same page. My web page actually consists mostly of pages with .jpg images with short 5-15 second videos all on the same page. Everweb can’t do this.
    Just thought you may want to know

    Also, because of this, I just went to a lot of trouble to set up my iMac so I could boot to an old Mojave operating system so I could continue to use Sandvox after installing the mew 64 bit Catalina operating system. After installing Catalina, very much to my surprise; – Sandvox is still working under the Catalina operating system. I cannot explain how that can be, but it is.

    1. Dear Jerry

      Thank you for the comment. I am sorry to hear about your problems about trying to recreate Sandvox’s Photos page in EverWeb. As I am sure you have discovered there are many different types of Photos pages in EverWeb’s theme templates. These often use the (Responsive) Image Gallery widget as an easy way for you to organise your images. You can add video to your page too using the Video, Vimeo or YouTube Widgets depending on your video format. From what I can tell from your message, it looks as if you want to combine the two formats on one page. You can do this by drag and dropping images on to the page then inserting the video widget between the images. You may also find that the FlexBox widget is of use as you can combine images and video using this widget.

      I appreciate that this may be a more manual task than it was in Sandvox. Indeed, this was a great Sandvox featue. I would also like to suggest that if my solutions do not help that you contact EverWeb Support in the first instance. You may also want to add this as a feature request on the EverWeb Forum.

      Unfortunately it’s never possible to duplicate all the features of one product in another, which inevitably leads to compromise when you finally have to choose a new product…

      I hope my suggestions help you.

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