Tell us about yourself…
My name is Adam Shiver. I'm a a web and graphic designer at heart. I am employed as an illustrator and designer for a major daily newspaper.
Tell us about Elixir Graphics…
Elixir is a web and graphics company located in sunny Orlando Florida. Our main focus is affordable, professional RapidWeaver themes. We also create custom RapidWeaver solutions as well icons and graphic design.
Why did you choose RapidWeaver?
I use RapidWeaver to power our sites because it is so dead simple to use and allows for quick updates and site maintenance. We use it to run our main Elixir site as well as our sister sites Icon Lab and CSStux.
What is RapidWeaver's best feature?
I truly love the blog feature of RapidWeaver. It allows for anyone to run a weblog and to keep it updated easily. It is cleaner, and more simple to understand and learn than other blogging solutions such as WordPress or TypePad.
I also really like that RapidWeaver is so expandable. Though RapidWeaver is already very flexible and can do so much, you can add to its extreme power through the use of third-party plug-ins. It is also great that it is hugely customisable through the use of third-party themes. This allows for RapidWeaver's options to be nearly limitless.
Are you using any third-party Add-ons?
Absolutely. I use some custom themes that I have designed for both the Elixir site and Icon Lab. It allows use the power of RapidWeaver and the ability to easily customise the look, feel and function of the sites.
I also use a ton of third-party plug-ins. Everything from YourHead's Collage plug-in for our CSStux site to YourHead's Blocks and Columns plug-ins. I also use Loghound's SiteMap and FAQ Maker on the Elixir site. They truly expand the flexibility of RapidWeaver.
Elixir Workspace: Where Adam creates magical themes.
Have you customised your site with third-party solutions?
Yes. We've implemented mootools on our front page to make it quite clean and hide away items that are less used in a collapsable header. It expands out in a similar fashion to the widgets drawer that Apple uses on their Dashboard.
I've also begun to use Cabel Sasser's Fancy Zoom javascript on some of our product pages to help clean up the site a bit and provide stylish pop-up information to our visitors.
Which part of your website are you most proud of?
I am really proud of our front page. When you go to the elixir site you're immediately presented with three large icons. These icons represent the three main areas of the site — Themes, Icons, and Weblog. It allows for people to focus on the most important areas of the site without getting distracted.
The drop down, hideaway menu and about box provides the user with the ability to go all over the site, if they want to but while the drop down menu is hidden the visitor remains very focused on what is important about our site.
Useful Links
RapidWeaver 4.2 is available for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
RapidWeaver 3.6 is available for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger