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Review: Apple’s iWeb software perfect for publishing photos, movies, podcasting, simple blogging

Saturday, January 28, 2006 · 10:36 am · 19 Comments

With Apple’s new iWeb software, “you can create a page, edit its contents later, and then repost the updated page. Apple includes several templates to build upon, wrapped in an interface that’s as simple to use as Pages (the word processor/desktop publishing software included in iWork ’06),” Jeff Carlson writes for The Seattle Times. “That sounds simple, but it’s a remarkably difficult thing to accomplish; Web design applications are either overly simple or way too complex for mortals who have no interest in becoming code monkeys. Apple, once again, applies its expertise at stripping away nonessential features to home in on what a program should be. But that’s not the best part of iWeb. It’s the conduit for taking all sorts of other iLife-created material to the Web, using the interaction that Apple has built across the iLife suite.”

Carlson has created a Web site that shows off some of these capabilities: http://web.mac.com/jeffc/iWeb/

“I created the main page, an About Me page, and a couple of photo pages directly in iWeb. Then I built a one-minute movie in iMovie HD that incorporates video clips, a still photo, and iMovie HD’s new themes. Taking advantage of GarageBand’s new capability to create video podcasts, I exported (which Apple refers to as “sharing”) the iMovie project directly into GarageBand and built a soundtrack. When I was satisfied with the result, I shared the movie to iWeb as a podcast, which formatted the video into a format that would also play on a video-capable iPod,” Carlson explains. “In iWeb, I chose a travel template for the podcast page, edited the text on the page, and clicked the Publish button to post the files to my .Mac site. Without any extra work on my part, the podcast is set up so that people can subscribe to it using iTunes or an RSS reader application and have the latest podcast entry automatically downloaded to their computers.”

“This example was building a movie, but you can also create audio-only podcasts in GarageBand, or maintain a text blog from within iWeb itself. If that’s the extent of your self-publishing aspirations on the Web, iWeb is a great solution. However, experienced Netizens may find iWeb lacking in some key areas,” Carlson writes. In his full article, Carlson explains iWeb’s limits and concludes, “The people using iWeb likely just want to publish photos and movies, and get started with blogging and podcasting without a lot of hassle. And that’s exactly what iWeb delivers.”

Full article here.

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Related articles:
First look at Apple’s new iWeb application – January 17, 2006

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Comment Feed

19 Comments

MacMDStudent

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 12:09 pm · Reply

Eh I bought iLife and was thinking that iWeb would be awesome but eh its ok… good for someone who is starting out with the bare basics but I still prefer rapidweaver as I think its simple enough for a novice to use and full featured for many other things, RW just has more options. iWeb has potiental but its not anywhere near close as of yet
MacMDStudent

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 12:10 pm · Reply

heheh hey cool I had the 1st post
M.X.N.T.4.1

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 12:21 pm · Reply

iWeb is for beginners and for knocking up quick sites to make use of your other iLife content for sharing with friends and family. For what it’s meant to do it does it pretty well. Obviously it would be nice if the code it output was clean semantically, size wise etc but at least it validates and the code can only get tidied up with future versions. For a version one product it’s pretty good – like pages was. I think Pages has really improved in its second incarnation and iWeb can only really do the same. Its a fair enough start.
Rhomboid

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 12:31 pm · Reply

That’s nice.
dlmeyer

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 12:58 pm · Reply

iWeb is easy to use, can produce some visually wonderful pages, and integrates simply and effectively with other iLife ’06 apps and .Mac accounts. Once you get past that high praise, there is little left to say about it – not if you want to praise it.
The pages are all-graphic and slow to load
You are currently limited to a dozen page designs
You are currently limited to half a dozen usage templates
There is no way to add HTML within the app

It’s pretty much a one-shot, not suited for even moderately complex sites, and its lack of designs, templates and flexibility will mean that people will quickly come to recognize “yet another iWeb site”. This is perfectly fine if you are a non-coder looking only to put up a personal/family site, but the minute you try to step beyond that you run into a wall. Being tightly and readily linked to .Mac is a Good Thing for a non-geek with a .Mac account and limited needs, but for a semi-geek? or a non-geek without a .Mac account, or anyone with more complex needs … it doesn’t cut it.
Tera Patricks

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 1:11 pm · Reply

Uh uh. Not too fast there, Jeffy. Maybe iWeb is perfect in Seattle for very simple web pages, but not in the rest of the world (nearby Redmond has a history of accepting low quality products). To be fair, iWeb is beautiful and shows great promise. For a dozen or so pages that have to be more beautiful than functional, iWeb is OK. The drag and drop is wonderful, so newbies will love it. Theme designs are fabulous and what you’d expect from Apple. Gawd, they’re beautiful, but… It’s a version 1.0 so there’s holes, too. File sizes often are huge. No nested category sub menus. No site wide template management (got an address or link on each of 24 pages but need to change something? 24 changes– ouch). Code is close to XHTML and CSS compliant but suffers from DIVitis and font errors to accommodate the design elements. Sandvox offers more layout tools but also suffers from beta syndrome; not mature yet. Rapidweaver is the better buy for the money. Theme designs are sparse and need improvement, but site management is more mature, web site tools are more complete. If you’re doing a dozen family pages, you’ll like iWeb. If you really want a site with good looks, compliant code, nested menus, and management tools, it’s not iWeb. Yet. RW is better.
gregory

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 1:18 pm · Reply

GO TO http://www.realmacsoftware.com

it is the best thing ever! for making web sites.
iSteve

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 1:45 pm · Reply

I’m curious to try iWeb. I’m an experienced blogger using MoveableType and recently WordPress. I’ve also used Google’s Blogger service. It is free blog sites such as blogger. live journal & such were iWeb is aimed. It is also aimed at photo sites such as Flicker. Compared to these I think iWeb will be easier, do more and look more professional.
Dank

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 2:07 pm · Reply

iweb is pretty powerful:

http://www.mattersmostmedia.org
Dank

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 2:09 pm · Reply

sorry, i typed the URL in wrong:

http://mattersmostmedia.org
PASteve

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 7:38 pm · Reply

iWeb is an amazing application for beginners. Truly amazing. Here is a site that I created in about 15 minutes: http://www.unclekimo.com/dreamgirls. If I had to do this in any other application, it would have taken hours.

Is it perfect? Nope. But for a 1.0 application, its ease of use, templates, and ability to build beautiful web site with little to no knowledge of code is what makes it so unique. I’ve tried (and use) Rapid Weaver, but that can be a tough program to use if you are a newbie. iWeb can be used right out of the box by anyone, which is its main selling point. I would have no qualms suggesting that a friend or even my own reitred father, pick this up and have fun!
b

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 9:48 pm · Reply

Uh uh. Not too fast there, Terry (Tera Patrick). Sounds like you’re someone who has a professional website.
Jeff says — “The people using iWeb likely just want to publish photos and movies, and get started with blogging and podcasting without a lot of hassle. And that’s exactly what iWeb delivers.”
Michael Cheung

Saturday, January 28, 2006 - 11:33 pm · Reply

I’m most impressed with the Photo slideshow. I love the way the pictures have the iChat AV mirrored floor, and the controls are hidden until you move the mouse above or below the main photo. I think this will do me just fine
Cory

Sunday, January 29, 2006 - 4:48 am · Reply

Like some of you said. It’s for beginers like me. And I love it! if there ever comes a time when I need more, I will take the suggested programs above for a test drive. But I think Apple did a great Job and right now I’m loving it.
Tom

Sunday, January 29, 2006 - 7:18 am · Reply

It’s unfortunate to see iWeb does not optimise images before uploading: the picture on the front takes about 4 seconds to load at 400k but should have been optimised to about 10% of that size. This is exactly the sort of thing Apple normally provides for those of us that don’t care to fire up photoshop and save for web at 75% for every image we load onto our websites. Oh well, maybe iLife 07 will address this?
gzero

Sunday, January 29, 2006 - 8:12 am · Reply

I’ve been using iWeb for the last couple of days, and I think that it has (at least for me) a couple of key advantages over RW and Sandvox:

1. Like RW and Sandvox, it uses themes. Unlike RW and Sandvox, however, you can rearrange or delete elements of themes in iWeb. In fact, with a little creativity it’s entirely possible to make your own page templates with iWeb, very quickly.

2. iLife apps integration is perfect. I’m a recording artist who has music available at the iTMS, so the ability to drag playlists into a site with direct links to the iTMS is brilliant. You can’t do that in RW and Sandvox. The Garage Band / iWeb combination for podcasting is pure genius. If you’re not taking advantage of iWeb’s iLife integration, you’re really missing out, IMO.

What I don’t like about iWeb is the fact that I can’t change the font or the location of the navigation bar links, but I’ve figured out a great workaround for that. I simply don’t have to use the navigation bar. I just create normal text links and create my own navi bar, and place it anywhere I want to. The tools for doing that are in iWeb

The DIVitis thing also is a bit irritating, but something I can live with. Bottom line is (as with any software), you really can do some wonderful things with iWeb if you dig a little deeper, and lay off the Kool-Aid a little. Of the 3 programs I’ve tried (RW, Sandvox and iWeb), iWeb is very easily my favorite, and will only get better.
dlmeyer

Sunday, January 29, 2006 - 9:34 am · Reply

Lay off the KoolAid?
Look … I’m glad you find iWeb sufficient to your needs. It certainly has the graphics side of things tied up in a bow. There are things it will let a novice do in a couple of minutes that were only available to graphic design teams who had $1,000+ in software as little as a month ago.
1. themes? It offers a dozen themes and half a dozen templates where RW and Sandvox offer twice as many of each. iWeb offers flexibility in changing the template and theme within the page, RW themes can all be modified (somewhat) site-wide. And RW lets you create new themes – not quite the same as the on-the-fly changes iWeb allows – if iWeb is customizing a car, RW is redesigning it.
2. iLife integration is excellent! The podcasts you create in GarageBand, pure genius or not, need not be published via iWeb. That’s just the easiest way to get it done – and the prettiest.
3. don’t forget Long Load Times. All those huge .png files and the convoluted code exact a price. The page you dedicate to your newborn can afford the hit … that’s an excellent use for the program.
gzero

Sunday, January 29, 2006 - 10:13 am · Reply

dlmeyer:

1. The number of themes and templates in each app was not the point of my comment. The ability to make changes to chose themes and templates was. RW’s ability to implement changes site wide is of course great, but the changes themselves are more easily made in iWeb.

2. “The podcasts you create in GarageBand, pure genius or not, need not be published via iWeb. That’s just the easiest way to get it done – and the prettiest”- thats exactly the point. Even “pros” like things to be easy sometimes, wouldn’t you agree?

3. I agree with you regarding load times, and I hope they improve that soon.

I guess it’s because I come from more of a layout background than a coding background that iWeb appeals to me, but I’m very well of iWeb’s shortcomings, and I’m confident they will be ironed out…at least I hope they will be. For a 1.0 release, iWeb is very cool.
Jeff

Monday, January 30, 2006 - 10:19 am · Reply

Crap like this is what slows down the internet. Lay off the fancy backgrounds folks. If I can’t see whats on your page in the first second, I’m moving on. Any page that takes 4 seconds to load is too long. Reduce the resolution of your photos. A web page doesn’t need a hi-res image on the page thats loading. Provide a lower res image of it thats linkable to a hi-res image. Stick with white backgrounds.

Learn CSS and forget about this stuff.