I wanted to quickly prototype a new website with the purpose of getting information to the high school seniors at our church. So why not use Apple’s iWeb 09 and my Mobile Me account?
There’s a lot to love about iWeb – just select a template and badda-bing, badda-boom you’re done. If you don’t like Apple’s templates there are (a limited number) of professionally designed iWeb templates from 3rd party suppliers.
You can add Google Adsense ads you your iWeb site with push-button simplicity. The iWeb Adsense Widget recognizes your Adsense account and provides a heads-up display menu with Adsense sizes and themes. Far easier than using Google’s site. Adding photos is just as easy, simply drag and drop from your gallery and iWeb resizes and places the picture.
So much for the good. Now for the ugly. If you want to have simple navigation, such as a tag cloud, you’ll have to bolt it into iWeb using a third party provider. The good news is that there is an HTML Snippet widget to make the task fairly easy. The bad news is that I couldn’t find a provider…after about 20 minutes of searching I gave up and switched to Word Press.
Actually the deal-breaker for me when it comes to iWeb is the fact that you can’t can’t cut text from another source and drop it into iWeb without bringing the text styling along with. For instance, I had a list of facts that I copied from another web page (attributed of course,) and I wanted it to display in the same text style as the rest of my page. Instead the new text retained the original text style from its source page. Weird.
I’m sure there’s a simple way to reapply text styles in iWeb, but I didn’t find it after fifteen minutes of poking around. Remember…I wanted this to be a fast easy way to prototype a website. I didn’t want to have to learn a new software app.
So in the end, as much as I loved working with iWeb, a couple of minor picks soured the deal. It would still be fun to use for a family site, just not clever enough to do what I wanted.
