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.

Photo pages have also had a bit of an improvement since iWeb 1.x. Each photo page can now include up to 500 photos; obviously this could be a bit of a problem for anyone on a dial-up Internet connection, so iWeb cleverly auto-paginates the gallery – you can tell it how many photos to put on each page using the same pop-up palette that appears when you click on the photo. There’s also now a “photo detail” view in the final web page you produce, much like the one available in the new .Mac photo galleries (see box out) that allow visitors to select photos from a thumbnail strip and see them in full resolution. And viewers can now add comments to individual photos, if you decide to let them.

Each theme, old and new, comes with a “My Albums” page type in iWeb 08 to complement the existing ‘movie’ and ‘photo’ pages. When you add a “My Albums” page to your site, it appears like a folder in the site list down the side. If you drag a movie or photo album page to the folder, it will appear on the page as an animated display of all the images or movies contained in the album. Alternatively, you can drag albums, events and movies from the iLife media browser to the ‘My Albums’ page and iWeb will create a corresponding page for them in your site. Your visitors will also be able to subscribe via RSS to the ‘My Albums’ page when it’s published so that whenever you add a new gallery, they’ll know about the change.

The ‘blog’ pages are a little cleverer than the standard web page type as well. When you create a blog, you get a folder that corresponds to the main index page of the blog. Within it, there’s an archive page listing the titles of all the blog entries and an ‘Entries’ page that you use to access your blog entries. When you select it, a list of the entries will appear at the top of the editing page, from which you can add new entries and delete existing ones. If you select an entry from the list, you’ll then be able to edit its layout as you would with any other page.

Take control
Indeed, with the layouts of any page, you needn’t feel limited by what Apple has provided you with via its themes. You can drag and drop items around the web page, resizing them using their corners (holding down the shift key to ensure they maintain the right shape). To make sure everything lines up nicely, the items will try to align themselves to other objects and on-screen guides will appear to indicate appropriate alignments.

Clicking the ‘Colors’ or ‘Fonts’ icons in the toolbar will open up the standard OS X palettes and enable you to change any selected page element, upping font size, changing font, or changing the colours. The ‘Adjust’ icon works just the same as its iPhoto counterpart and allows you to change the contrast, brightness, saturation, et al of a selected image. There’s also a ‘Shapes’ button that produces a pull-down menu of squares, circles, lines and more that you can add to the web page. Clicking on the “Text Box” button will create a box into which you can add more text to your page. If you need to have items overlap, the “Forward” and “Backward” will let you pick which item is in front and which is behind.

The most powerful tool, though, is the Inspector palette, which gives you access to many advanced options, such as text wrapping, drop shadows, and hyperlinking, as well as more information about the web page itself and anything you have selected. Anything you want to do but can’t see to find a tool to do it: try the Inspector palette.

Someone else’s problem
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, with iWeb 1.x was its inability to deal with external HTML. This might not seem such a big issue at first, with iWeb’s fabulous layout tools and built-in capabilities. But unless iWeb explicitly supported a feature, you couldn’t add it to your site even if all the browsers in the world did. So that meant no YouTube, Google Maps or anything else cool, unless you were prepared to resort to iWeb Enhancer.

Now, iWeb 08 gives us a new toolbar icon, “Web Widgets”, that gets round all of that. Now you can just select “HTML Snippet” from the Web Widgets list of tools, copy and paste the HTML you want to add to your web page into a floating palette, and iWeb will add it to the page, giving you an immediate preview of what it looks like. “Web Widgets” also includes support for Google Maps, so you can add a Google Map to a page just by typing in the address you want to display, and Google AdSense (see walkthrough two). Lastly, if you have any .Mac web galleries that are publicly viewable, iWeb will automatically include them in the “Web Widgets” menu (see box out)

Publish and be praised
When you’re done creating your sites, if you have a .Mac account, you can click on the “Publish” button and iWeb will create all the necessary files for your web site and upload them to your .Mac web space. You can always tell which of your pages have been published and which need to be updated, since they’re colour-coded in your site list: red if they need to be updated, blue for up-to-date, and green for archives.

However, if you want to use iWeb to publish to another web host, you can still use iWeb’s “Publish to a folder” option and use another program, such as Transmit (www.panic.com/transmit) and CyberDuck (http://cyberduck.ch/), to upload the necessary files.

When it’s published, you’ll need to know the URL of site to tell people where to go. If you’re using your own site, that should be easy. Otherwise, you can click on the “Visit” button to go straight to the site in your web browser and copy the URL. There’s also an ‘announce’ feature that emails people with the URL of your site. If you have a .Mac account, you can also now use your own personal domain name with iWeb, which makes things much simpler when you’ve set it up (see walkthrough 1).

iWeb might not be the most powerful web design program. But it has almost everything the average Mac user needs and makes creating beautiful and powerful web pages and blogs easy.

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