iWebbiness

As it stands, I have designed my business’ website (www.dandymac.com) with Apple’s iLife web building app, iWeb. For the most part I feel that it’s a beautifully designed, easy to use piece of software. Apple does a fantastic job making it simple to create a basic website for “the rest of us.”

If you do not need anything terribly complex or have a blog that is at all customized, it is great. I, however, do want to have a customized blog that fits the rest of my customized site (i.e. I did not use an iWeb template). Unfortunately, I had such a woefully difficult time doing so that I had to create my blog here in WordPress. I must admit that WordPress has made it very easy to get it going quickly.

The main problem being that since I created my site from a blank page in iWeb, I cannot just save it as a “theme.” Therefore, each time I wanted to create a new blog entry I had to completely redesign the page before I could even type into it. This could get tedious quick and be a huge time-waster. The other problems I found with blogging in iWeb were the text color options for titles and date could not be changed, and the inspector leaves a lot to be desired for editing the blog page.

Otherwise I found that iWeb was a breeze to work with and fully customize a web site. It takes very little understanding of web design or any sort of coding to get a great site up and running. With the use of their built-in “themes” it really is a basic no-brainer. All you really need to do is drag your own media into the pre-built pages, put in your own text and you are all set. Thanks to iWeb 09, publishing is now a breeze as well, even if you have your own domain name and host already. The best method yet, in my opinion, is to have a mobileme account and publish right to it with no setup.

For those who may want to really get down to the fine details of the look and feel of your web site, the inspector is your best friend. With it you can change the page layout sizes and colors, you can change the text as though it were a mini word processor, you can add graphic effect, change the size of your page elements (pictures, video, sound…), create hyperlinks and their rollover colors, play with Quicktime file settings and much more. They really did a nice job with it for the most part, yet as I mentioned before the blog controls could be better.

One of the things that I have found immensely useful is the widgets and media side panel they have added in the 09 version. Here you have easy access to all of your movies, pictures and audio always there or hidden if you desire. Also you have a widgets tab where you will find a Google maps widget for adding maps to your page,  a Google AdSense widget for putting adds on your site you get paid for if people click on them, an iSight widget that lets you use your built-in iSight camera for immediate pictures or films and a couple others. The most useful one is for adding html snippets to your page: you can check this out by looking at the form on my website (www.dandymac.com). I added that with some html code with great ease and I think it looks and works fantastic.

Overall, I would say that iWeb is a very solid, stable, easy to use, feature-rich application. Especially if you are not a web designer and just want to put together a highly functional and visually appealing site in a very short period of time. I find it falls right between the likes of Sandbox and Freeway. The added ease of media access, full iLfe/iWork integration, widgets at your side, and publishing to your own domain with a single click make iLife 09 worth the price alone.