Derek and Melissa’s Family

iWeb

by Derek—2006.01.27 @ 0942

My rating: 3 out of 5

I finally got a chance to look through iWeb, Apple’s addition to the iLife suite of applications. At first glance, I thought I could even use iWeb for my own website, but I quickly realized that iWeb is not suited for my workflow. What iWeb does best is produce personal websites for people who have little or no knowledge of web publishing. It really makes quick work of what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing.

In my exploring, I created a few pages to see how each section works. For the most part, each template you pick can be easily modified, with a few exceptions. The most painful is with the navigation and typography. The navigation or menu bar is completely automated based on the pages you add to your site. You can supress pages from appearing in the navigation, but beyond that you have no control. The help page states:

iWeb automatically creates a navigation menu on each page in your website. The navigation menu lists each page in your site as a link which your visitors can click to go to that page. As you add, delete, and reorganize pages on your site, the navigation menu updates automatically. You can’t modify the appearance of the navigation menu (by changing fonts, for example).

You can prevent a page from appearing in the navigation menu so that visitors won’t see the page (unless you include a link to it on another page). You might want to prevent a page from appearing in the navigation menu if, for example, you’re not finished with the page when you publish the site.

With typography, you have a little more control, except with certain page types (specifically blog pages). You can’t modify the base template and make those changes appear for new postings.

Even with these limitations, iWeb is a great program that fills a need. In fact, it was a perfect fit for Breton who used iWeb to launch his new band website, http://www.travisty.com.

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