iWeb 08 users guide

• Article 57 of 89
• MacFormat, November 2007

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It seems odd to think there was a time when iLife was a bit fazed by this new-fangled web thing. While all the various iLife apps had their own built-in functions for web publishing, this amounted to little more than creating photo galleries. Creating a whole web site? No.

Then along came iLife 06 with new kid on the block, iWeb. Not only did iWeb replace the mish-mash of web capabilities in the rest of the iLife suite, it was also the simplest, most user-friendly way for someone to put together a web site or blog. Working just like a page layout program, it let you drag and drop pictures, movies and other elements onto some rather tasteful templates and publish them directly to your .Mac account, producing web pages identical to the layouts you’d just created. No special knowledge required; all the tedious drudgery, like adding extra links from your existing pages whenever you added a new page to your site, taken away; great iLife integration for quick access to your photos, movies and music; and support for Web 2.0 features like podcasts and RSS feeds that even high-end apps don’t have. iWeb made everything simple.

Of course, all version 1.0 apps have their problems and iWeb was no exception. Although iWeb 1.1 fixed the issue of the un-bloginess of iWeb blogs, finally giving visitors the ability to leave comments on blog entries, iWeb still had flaws that software such as iWeb Enhancer and Multisite for iWeb had to fill in.

Now iWeb 2.0 aka iWeb 08 is here and it has some new tricks up its sleeves. Not all the flaws have been fixed, but it’s getting close not just to being the top app for simple and attractive Web 2.0 publishing, but to being one of the most powerful.

Just in case you’re worried it might all be different now or you’ve never used iWeb and want to take the plunge, relax: it’s still as simple to use as it ever was. iWeb works using ‘sites’ and ‘pages’ as before. You create a site for each web site you want to manage. To this web site, you add pages – naturally enough – and iWeb provides you with a group of standard page types from which to choose. There’s a ‘Welcome’ page that introduces people to the site. There’s an ‘About me’ page that tells people all about you or the site in more detail. Then there are different kinds of pages for different kinds of media: a ‘photos’ page for photos, a ‘movie’ page for movies and a ‘podcast’ page for your audio files. New to iWeb 08 is a ‘My Albums’ page for cataloguing your movie and photo pages. Lastly, there’s a blank page for when you want to start from scratch, and a special ‘blog’ page which lets you create a weblog – which, if you don’t know, is like an online diary, with entries for different days and different topics.

The biggest fears most people have about creating a web page (or indeed a printed document) are that it’s going to look rubbish and that it’s going to be hard to create. With iWeb, almost any page you create is going to look good. For starters, you’re never really going to be starting from scratch. Whenever you create a web page in iWeb, you have to choose a ‘theme’ for it. Apple has created some really attractive templates for you to use, each for different kinds of web site and people. Planning a site for your holiday photos? Why not try ‘Travel’ or ‘Road Trip’? ‘Kids Blue’ and ‘Kids Pink’ are great for… kids. ‘Modern’ is for the stylish among us, while ‘Night Life’ is great for people who are going to be creating their web sites in the day, because they’re not at home of an evening. All the themes that were available in iWeb 1.x are still available, are there are eight news ones, bringing the total you can pick from to 26. In case you’re a real lover of variety, you don’t have to stick to one theme with your site: you can mix and match as much as you like.

If later on you decide you’ve made a taste faux pas, it’s now a lot easier in iWeb 08 to switch the theme of a web page you’ve already created: there’s an extra theme button in the toolbar that you can click, producing a menu of all the available themes; select a new one and your page will switch to using the new theme. Of course, if your new theme is narrower or wider than your old one, or you’ve deleted certain elements, you’ll need to do some tidying up, but it’s mostly painless and takes just a couple of seconds.

Once you’ve chosen a theme and a page type, iWeb will create the page and put it in your site. The interface of iWeb 08 is pretty much the same as it was with iWeb 1.x. All your pages and sites are down the left-hand side; there’s a toolbar at the bottom with common tasks and tools; and the page you’re editing is in the main frame on the right.

Now all you need to do is replace the default text, images, audio and/or movies on your new page with your own content. If you’ve used a word processor, you already know how to edit the text. Replacing the images and movies is just a question of dragging and dropping. You can either drag and drop from the Finder, or you can click on the “Media” button in the toolbar to open up the iLife Media Browser. From that, you can drag iPhoto images, events or movies; iMovie movies; or GarageBand and iTunes tunes – at least, the ones that aren’t copy-protected.

For the ‘photo’ pages, things get a little cleverer – but only a little. You can drag and drop iPhoto events and albums onto the page and all the photos within will appear. What’s clever is that you can drag and drop the photos to reorder them, change their spacing, give them captions and more, and iWeb will juggle everything accordingly, without forcing you to manage the little details.

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