iWeb Review
The Site
I was excited about iWeb. The process of converting something I make up in Illustrator into a functional web page is beyond me. Dreamweaver is a bit too complex for me, image slices make me frightened, and everything else just doesn’t seem to cut the cake. So I thought, yeah, iWeb will be great. Apple makes good, easy to use products. I was largely wrong about the good part.
- Attractive Templates
- Automatic Vector Image Handling
- Excellent Media Integration
The Bad
- No Blank Template
- No Template Creation or Save As
- Very Limited Advanced Controls
- No Code View
- No FTP Upload
For reference, you can take a look at the page I made for this review.
iWeb’s release came at a perfect time for me. I had just completed the mockup of a wedding site for my fiancé and I in Illustrator, and was waiting for Jesse to convert it into usable CSS and HTML. But then Apple announced iWeb, and I thought, perfect, I’ll just whip up the page in there.
Hints of the Plague
If my goal had been to publish a personal .mac page based on one of Apple’s included templates, iWeb would have been nearly perfect. Sadly iWeb’s been needlessly crippled so as to dissalow anything beyond this fairly narrow usage.
The first sign of this crippling is iWeb’s lack of any sort of blank template. Upon loading iWeb presents a list of templates, and requires the user to choose from one, without the option of starting with a blank document. I’m sure that plenty of users will be happy with the Apple provided templates, they’re well designed, graphically appealing, and functional. But the lack of a blank template is ridiculous.
Once you’ve chosen a template, everything on the page is completely WYSIWYG and customizable through either the main screen; where you edit text, images, and shapes, or the Inspector Palate; where you edit backgrounds, headers, footers, and so fourth. After ten minutes or so, most of this begins to feel intuitive.
But then a few more of iWeb’s limitations emerge, such as the fact that you can’t insert web colors, you have to pick them from a list. Certainly most iWeb users won’t want to insert FFFFFF and the like, but there seems no reason to not include the ability.
Some Redemption
My favorite thing about iWeb was its integration with vector graphics and its automatic generation of the png’s when it needs them. iWeb lets users add all sorts of things like vector images from Illustrator, nonstandard fonts, etc.. and than automatically converts those things to png’s after you click “Publish”. The only imperfect part of the process is that the user has no control of when the images are converted to png’s. This meant that when I wanted to create a sidebar in an unusual font, I tried to create links which iWeb rendered as text links, complete with underlines, and then converted the text to images, but still with the “this is a link” underlines on them.
I later discovered that you can make entire text boxes links, which seemed to solve this problem, but that aside, some sort of “rasterize text” command from a rightclick menu would be very helpful here.
Creating shapes, like rounded boxes and the like, works exactly as it should. It’s as simple as selecting the shape you want, placing it on the page, and resizing and editing at however you’d like it to be. iWeb will also let you do some handy more advanced things, like adding drop-shadows to both shapes and text.
The Deal Breaker
I discovered iWeb’s greatest limitation soon after I tried to create sidebar links. I was ready to create a second page in my wedding site design, and discovered that there was no way to create a copy of an existing page. No “Save as template”, no “Edit, Copy” option on the site organizer tab, nothing. I consulted the help file. Nothing. I went on to Apple’s support site and found a thriving discussion on the topic, but no solutions.
I couldn’t believe it. The only way around this problem is to, for each page of your site, start with one of Apple’s included templates, delete everything from that layout that can be deleted (though Apple decided that the title and one text box can never be deleted), re-define background colors, browser colors, page height and width, the presence or absence of headers and footers, and then copy page elements over from your previous page.
This is a glaring deficiency of iWeb. I looked for a workaround. The most obvious would be to look at the file structure of iWeb’s saves or template files and simply copy my site design into the template folder. But it was not to be, iWeb saves all of its data in one .site file, impenetrable by the average human, and its templates are saved in an equally impenetrable xml database.
There seems to be no reason for iWeb to exclude user designed templates, or pages based on previously created pages. Maybe Apple has some long-ranging plan of creating an internet full of the same 4 basic template designs; perhaps they just thought that their templates were so brilliant that pages based on anything less would be sacrilege.
A bit more niftyness
iWeb’s image insertion and editing features are pretty nifty. After bringing in a photo from iPhoto, it brings up that sexy Aperture’esque dialogue box that lets you do some basic picture adjustments. I’m not sure who wouldn’t adjust their pictures until they were ready to place them on a page, but it’s a nice feature to have.
The program also allows for drop shadows, and the brilliant reflection feature which I’m sure will be ubiquitous on .mac pages in the near future.
Sill More Dissapointment
iWeb only automatically uploads to .mac accounts, but has no FTP upload features. The only non .mac export option is to save your site to a folder, thereby requiring another step, and another needless program.
The Wrap Up
iWeb does some things better than any simple HTML editor that I’ve used. It makes it easy to create media-rich, attractive pages. But it has some ridiculous limitations that make it a very disappointing application.
If iWeb’s development team released a patch that allowed user created templates and added FTP upload compatibilities, iLife owners would have likely the best WYSIWYG website editor out there. As things stand now, they have one of the worst.
January 19th, 2006 at 7:28 am
Can you upload an iWeb creation to one’s personal web site using Fetch?
January 19th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Yeah, once youre site is exported, it’s pretty easy to upload via FTP, I think I’m just spoiled with Dreamweaver’s site synchronization and whatnot.
January 19th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
Why does everyone seem to gripe about the lack of a blank template, one can get pretty damn close?
Create a welcome or video page from the white template set. Select all elements on the page and delete them. Now, this will actually still leave the title box and main content box, but you can select the text in them and delete the text, if not the boxes themselves. Next challenge is the navigation bar at the top of the page. One can get rid of that by ensuring that all pages in that site have the checkbox saying include in menu unticked.
That effectively gives a blank page, albeit with two text boxes that don’t actually show, but then since a page is still going to have a title and content, you can probably use them somewhere anyway. You will also need to create your own navigation bar on each page.
The navigation bar is the real problem, as the need to ensure that no page is marked to be included in it, means you can’t have a mix of pages within the one site where some have the automatic navigation bar and some don’t. This is possibly what people are really winging about when they say they can’t have a blank page.
That said, there is a way around this as well, although it may not result in an ideal directory structure. What you can do is create more than one site. In one site, have your main pages with navigation bars intact. In the other site create pages where all pages are marked so that the title is never put into the navigation bar. You can then simply drag the page reference from the site outline pane to a page in the site with navigation bars and it will create a hyperlink with proper relative URL.
When you now publish your sites, they will sit parallel to each other in the export directory and through that hyperlink you can move from pages with navigation bars to ones without. Depending on how you plan your web site structure this may even turn out to be a natural way of doing it, but maybe not always.
Anyway, it can be done, even if not always ideal. Overall I would say the bigger nuisance in iWeb is the inability to duplicate a page to avoid having to manually do custom layout on multiple pages when you want a common theme. I haven’t looked too deeply at the AppleScript calls provided yet, but maybe there is a way of doing it with that by iterating over elements in a page and copying from one page to another.
Sorry for picking your blog for this rant, it was just one of a number which mention blank pages. Not sure of any particular site at the moment where tips like this can be posted.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:27 am
I tried to edit my creation in Iweb with dreamweaver and frontpage without succsess.
I did however uploaded my first attemt with an ftp progg, but there is little I can do when I want to add my own photoalbum, media etc since its not going to work if you dont use .mac
Im very dissapointed at all limitations if you dont strictly following the apple way or no way.
January 20th, 2006 at 12:29 am
I forgot to mention that there is no way other people can write in you bog, there is simply no option for that, and when you update you web pages in Iweb it creates all the file all over again since Im publishing to a folder on my mac making a mess
January 20th, 2006 at 12:58 am
To sailingaction, .mac should not required to do photo albums or add other media. The only things you really loose by not using .mac are stuff like Ajax photo slideshows (it falls back to some other way of doing it I think, but still works) and page counters. Ie., stuff where some special .mac backend support is required. There is not much that requires that though. So, not sure where you get the idea that you can’t do photo albums, other media etc. You aren’t basing you assumptions on pointing Safari directly to the files in the file system after you export are you. You should at least host them through Apache running on your own box to see how things work.
January 20th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Oh forgot, password protection as setup from iWeb is also only supported on .mac. There may be other little things I have overlooked, but all the major things should work okay when hosted elsewhere.
January 20th, 2006 at 10:03 am
When I was searching for a workaround for the user template limitation on Apple’s support forums, I stumbled across a java replacement for the .mac only slideshow problem. It didn’t look too difficult. I wonder how long before we see other hosting companies advertizing .mac functionality with iweb.
Also, the blog publishing function seems to be a joke. When itt said that it would let users blog, I thought it implied some sort of integration with blogger.com, wordpress, etc… Who’s going to blog using iWeb and not one of the much simpler solutions already out there?
The hype before iWeb’s release implied a replacement for both Dreamweaver and MarsEdit, we got neither.
January 20th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
One limitation I found annoying was that all the new pages are automatically created at the top for a menu. You can’t change the location of the menu, move the menu elements around. I really hate menues at the top, unless it will only be 4-5 pages. but any more than than and you have to have them on the side. One thing i have not found on any easy web page creation tool is sub page creation. With iWeb you can make pages that don’t appear in the menu, but it would be so cool if you could apply it as a sub page under a menu item and it automatically pops out with flash or java as a sub page, when you click on a parent page, the menu then has the subpages shown in the menu.
January 23rd, 2006 at 4:32 pm
NB: If you upload to an FTP site many of the features are dumbed down. There is not cool slideshow, no hit counter, etc.
January 28th, 2006 at 3:21 am
Basically, I think we need to wait iweb 2.0 because this one is completly disapointig. It seems that developers were on a hurry to set up this software by last keynote and they forgot, or they had not time enough to finish very basic things, such as create your own template and resaonable options for the blog. What kind of blog you have if noboday can answer you?
January 30th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Could some1 maybe tell me how to use the file i exported from iweb to put on my friends webpage www.dirtygumdrops.com. The site was registered with name secure, namesecure.com
thank you soooo much!
noel
noeljohnhoward@gmail.com
(once i get it working, i’ll make a page in honor of the person who helps me!)
January 30th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
Now that I have a chance to browse through the discussion forum, I think it’s wise to stay with Dreamweaver. Thanks guys for your input!
February 26th, 2006 at 6:14 am
So, has anyone figured out how to upload pages to a server besides .mac?
ipower web, who I use can’t figure it out.
March 5th, 2006 at 1:57 am
Hi Christian,
There is no automatic, in iWeb method. But you can publish the site to your local disk and then upload it using a standard FTP program such as Transmit.
You can probably even simplify the process by mounting the FTP folder on your desktop using the Finder’s “Connect to Server” feature (CMD-K) and then publishing the site directly to there.(That would work, except that Finder’s FTP mounting is read-only. Grumble, grumble…)March 18th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
I’m with you on the no ‘Save As Template’ feature. I did one page in about an hour, then needed to do 30 more just like it and was like OMGWTF!?
sheer lame.
and Secret Squirrel, i really doubt anyone read your 3000 page manifesto, do you work at apple?
September 13th, 2006 at 11:53 am
As far as duplicating pages go:
Right click a page - “Duplicate”
August 13th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
You can duplicate a page. You wrote “I discovered iWeb’s greatest limitation soon after I tried to create sidebar links. I was ready to create a second page in my wedding site design, and discovered that there was no way to create a copy of an existing page. No “Save as template”, no “Edit, Copy” option on the site organizer tab, nothing. I consulted the help file. Nothing. I went on to Apple’s support site and found a thriving discussion on the topic, but no solutions.”
You just right click on the page you want to duplicate in the site organizer menu and click duplicate