iWeb: A First Look
A few days ago I purchased the new iLife Suite. It arrived and I have spent the weekend exploring some of the new features in this year’s edition. I was most interested in the new application, iWeb. The old applications have been upgraded, but not modified enough so that a user of a past version would experience any trouble. So, this is strictly a review of iWeb so that you can decide for yourself if this new package is worth your money.
What iWeb is
It is very important that any potential buyers know exactly what iWeb is. It is an application for creating personal websites. Now, this personal website can easily include pictures, slide shows of pictures, movies, podcast and of course, any documentation you feel like publishing. Furthermore, if you have a .Mac subscription, you will be able to get much more out of this software than if you don’t subscribe. It is heavily tied into Apple’s online service. So, if you already have a .Mac subscription then this application should be much more appealing to you. If you don’t, then you need to seriously examine whether or not this applications limited feature set is worth the money.
What iWeb isn’t
IWeb is NOT a general purpose website creation application. Do not make the mistake of thinking it is a scaled down version of Dreamweaver, as it most definitely is not. This application is designed to publish personal websites either to .Mac or to a folder to be used via another hosting service. It does nothing else.
The iWeb experience
When opening iWeb you will notice that it doesn’t give you the option to create a blank webpage, instead you given a choice of 12 templates to use. Yet, even within these templates you do not have complete control. You can move, insert and rearrange things like pictures, text and special links. However you are prohibited from changing the links that connect the pre-generated pages. So, if you created a site with four pages (a homepage, a music page, a pictures page and a info page for example) you could add all of the pictures you wanted. You could create a slide show of those pictures. You could type in as much text as you wanted. You could add background music, links to a file, links to another website or even have a page full of Quicktime movies.
What you can’t do, though, is change any of the main links at the top of the page. You see, every time you add a new page (from one of six template pages), a link to that page is inserted at the top of every page in your website. You have no control of this process. So, you had just better like the fact that the homepage’s link will always be in a preset font with a preset color. This lack of control over your website can prove frustrating to those of us wanting more customization.
Pros - Why you should buy this software
This new application is ideal for anyone who meets the following criteria:
- has little to no experience designing webpages
- doesn’t mind spending $100 a year for a .Mac subscription
- won’t mind giving up lots of creative control in exchange for the ability to easily and rapidly create a slick looking site
If you fall into this category (and a lot of users will) then iWeb might be for you. I must admit, it does look very good. And it is remarkably easy to operate. You can open this program for the first time (and assuming you already have all of your picture. music and movies ready to go plus you already have .Mac) and in 30 minutes or less have a brand new website. This is one of the simplest Apple programs I have ever used.
Cons - Why other packages might serve you better
If you were hoping for an easy to use, general purpose, website creation app . . . keep hoping. Anyone wanting more power, more flexibility and more control is better served with another application. Maybe iWeb Version 2.0 will offer more features and thus appeal to a larger crowd. But for now, any one above the novice level of website design will be left feeling frustrated at the lack of options iWeb provides.
Overall recommendation
Even though it is remarkably easy to use, iWeb is so heavily structured that only the most basic of users will find it adequate. Everyone else will chafe under its restrictive templates. And while its extreme tie-in with .Mac is useful, those unwilling to subscribe will find that they are missing out on a big part of iWeb’s capabilities. So, the real cost is $79 +$100 a year for as long as you decide to keep .Mac around. Thus overall I can’t recommend iWeb as a compelling enough reason, by itself, to buy iLife ‘06. If you are content with an older version of iLife then spend your money on Dreamweaver or some other, similar application. Maybe one day iWeb will grow up into a real application, but until then save your money.
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Comments
I thought iWeb was pretty cool until I took a look at the generated HTML. Virtually all the text you enter in iWeb is generated as graphics. And there is no use of external style-sheets, all styles are inline to the item they modify. Amusingly, the pages would actually be faster to load if they were generated as a single graphic. But it actually uses overlapping images. So for instance, if you look at the Travel template, where there’s a photo peeking out from behind a log book? That’s actually a full photo, you can drag it out and see the whole thing. The user is downloading it all, even though they can only see the corner of it.
Now if you’ve just typed something in some weird font, and are displaying it at a 20 degree angle, the way some of the templates allow you to, then it’s understandable that it would have to be generated as an image. But there’s no way to control what is generated as an image, and what is text. Nor to discover which will occur. I understand that that the difference is difficult to explain to people, but it does matter. The use of alt-tags and such makes sure the content is there, but the ability to cut and paste, search the HTML page for something… that’s all gone. This is the kind of generated HTML that very early web-editing products produced last century. I didn’t expect to see it in a modern Apple product.
Re: #14.
Is sential the site you created with iWeb, Luke?
I think you should see this program as one that is meant for the billions of people that have once tried to create a website using the export function in Microsoft Word… It is a program that lets them do just what they wanted and wasn’t possible with Word: a very precise “wysiwyg” web page editor.
To me, iWeb seems great for people who are not interested in learning the basics of web design. People that just want the ability to publish in a really consistent “wysiwig” way. Consistent with their original design and consistent on all browsers and platforms…
It is the dream of the person who once regretted spending a lot of time designing a nice page in MS Word and clicked “export to html"… Plus it lets him easily add photos, movies, music… with many effects and creates their rss feed for podcasts !
Of course, it doesn’t make real “clean” code, the way typical webdesigners expect to see it. They had to only use images! How else could you make it that the fonts and colors that the person chose to use when he designed his web page would be the ones used on other computers? How else could you guarantee such precise drag and drop placement of items on the web page? The average user, like my parents, really won’t mind if their web page takes a bit longer than others to load… They won’t be placing any advertisement on it anyways… (other perhaps than the “made with a mac” logo they’ll proudly wear on their site...) At least, they’ll avoid a lot of frustration…
I think Apple did a GREAT job with this and am really expecting great improvements with future releases. This sort of software is what I have been expecting them to do for a long time. I’m sure it will be a success.
And also, I have been plaing with it for a little while too and I’d like to say the author is wrong when he says you are limited to Apple’s templates. This thing is a lot more “tweakable” than you’d first think. As said previously, you don’t have to have any of the standard navigation items appearing on any page. Also, there are two “templates” called “black” and “white"… Just take any of these and easily delete all the items that are preset on the page. You got a blank page with which you may do anything you want, import any graphics, use any fonts, any design you wish… Build all the links. The only limit I have really found is the page size…
I’m pretty sure one of the future improvements could be a system offered for .mac accounts that lets you have friends leave comments in your blog/podcast…
I created a sample blog and managed to add haloscan comments to it. I have also been looking at the templates… they are XML based, so I think it should be possible to get iWeb to generate the code the comments, once I figure out the XML schema…
http://www.4haks.net/4haks/Blog/22E10B71-321F-4C87-9D17-F1C89393A2F7.html
oh, sorry skj - I didn’t see your post until now. No, Sential I wrote by hand. I was hoping someone could link me to an iWeb -site. But I see sabshire has covered this now
Just noticed I’d stupidly misread your original post, thinking you wanted someone to look at your site.
Anyway, all’s clearer now.
Some other reviewers have noted this discretion, and I must add my weight to the argument that iWeb does not necessarily require a friggin’ .Mac account. That’s just preposterous. If you have any clue as to how to use either host-supplied web submission form or an ftp client to upload your folder contents to your hosting service provider, then this app is fine for cranking out some quick and slick sites. My main complaints are about the restrictiveness of font choices in certain site elements (e.g. NavBar) and placement of navigation menus as well as template creation.
I am currently in the process of deconstructing the built-in templates, so I’ll see if those can serve as models for future user-created templates.
A site I made with iWeb can be seen here.
I know almost nothing about web design, and was a little frightened when I ordered Ilife 06 for iweb and then read some reviews and saw some very uncreative sites, but I now realize most of those people were limited by their creativity. I love it, and it has just reaffirmed my faith in Apple’s ingenuity.
This is the site I made for a coffee house in Omaha I help run…
http://www.omahafoundry.com