The Apple Files

Written on June 25, 2006 – 11:42 pm | by iSwitch |

From my previous post, you may have already seen my very first iWeb creation. As you might expect, it didn’t take very long at all to create the page. And it sure looks nice. However, iWeb has a long way to go before I would use it to create webpages that I can fully customise.

For example, I may want to add an embedded video from YouTube into my webpage or place some adverts in a sidebar. Trying to do this with iWeb is definitely not what it was designed for.

Also, iWeb pages seem to take a very long time to load. My guess as to why this is so would be that the webpages are very graphics heavy. In fact, the template I used (Freestyle) actually converts all text typed in the default font into image .png files before generating the webpage:

While you can get your website to look all pretty this way, using any font of your choice and still have it display correctly in any web browser, you should also realise that the ‘text’ is gone once you’ve created the webpage. You cannot copy and paste it if you wanted to. Moreover, your webpage will not be searchable and will not be picked up by search engines.

Another quirk of iWeb is that once you’ve selected a template (theme) and created your content, you cannot change themes without starting again from scratch. Also, the fact that the templates are only presented to the user in thumbnail view before making the webpage means you cannot clearly see all the details of the template before making your choice:


However, if you are also just starting out with iWeb and find this to be a problem, I have created sample photo pages of all the templates built into iWeb. You may find this useful to check out the template in all its glory before deciding to use it. The templates are viewable here. You can navigate through the different templates by using the navigation menu on the top of each page.