I gave it the ol’ college try.  I’ve been using iWeb to support two websites for about a year or so.  There are definitely things I like about it, and I’d even recommend it under certain circumstances.  But for myself, the ride is over.  The hassle at this point just isn’t worth it.

So here are my thoughts now as a sort-of ex-iWeb user.

When I’d recommend iWeb:

1) You hardly ever update your site.  iWeb has to render your ENTIRE site after EVERY update, even if you just change the spelling of one page.  This was an endless pain in the ass.  And if your site has lots of blog entries, like mine did, it takes forever to render.

Also, because it re-renders the whole site, you cannot sort the NEW entries by date.  You just have to know what you’ve updated.  But since iWeb applies its own naming scheme to blog entries, you have to actually hunt down your new pages.  And the reason why you have to do all of this is that the site that iWeb outputs is HUGE.  And unless you have the bandwidth speed to upload everything every time you update, you’ll only want to upload the changes.

2) You have a dot mac account.  Most of these problems go away.  A dot mac account enables single-click publishing that only re-renders and and only uploads any changes.  It also allows comments and search on your website.  The file sizes are still huge, so you still want to be a low to moderate user or you will exhaust your piddling 1GB of storage.

When I wouldn’t recommend iWeb:

Under any other circumstances.

I like the templates (a lot) but unlike Word Press Themes, you can’t change themes once you’ve created a page.  That sucks.  The file sizes are unbelievable huge.  The pages load slowly.  And you can’t import your site or pages into any other web development application.

Right now, iWeb is simply too reliant on dot mac to make it really usable, a fact I kind of resent.  It could be a great application for beginners and moderate uses, but it’s too disabled, clunky, and slow.  The cons simply outweigh the pros.