Creating a website with iWeb.
If You're on a Mac, Apple Has Created a Web Program Just For You
Do you have podcast you want to share with the world? Or, a blog that needs a home? How about a place to showcase your small business? Look no further than iWeb.
If you would like to have your own website but think your only options are to spend a lot of time learning complicated code so you can do it yourself or else pay someone a lot of money to do it for you, good news: If you're on a Mac, you don't have to do either. A program called iWeb is an extremely easy tool for creating a website that can be as basic as a few pages where you house your vacation photos or a multimedia extravaganza where you can publish your own blogs, movies, slideshows and podcasts.
But iWeb isn't just for frivolous fun. Small businesses or the self-employed will find everything they need to present their products or services in an extremely attractive light. iWeb is designed so that even if you don't know the first thing about creating a website, yours will still end up looking like a high-priced professional devoted hours to it.
You don't have to be an expert
But wait a second, you're saying, I don't know anything about fonts and layouts. You don't have to. Apple has done it all for you. You can pick from dozens of themes created to cover almost every style or voice you might need for your site; from fun "Kid's Pink" to more professional themes like "Modern" and "Formal". Simply click on one of the themes and you will see the following four templates, or pages, appear, ready for you to fill with your own content: movie, blog, podcast and blank. Click on one and your new page appears in a handy menu bar where you can see the pages you've created, rearrange them and click on them to make any changes.
Replacing content
Replacing the existing content is as simple as dragging and dropping your own text and photos into the space you want changed. But what if you don't like any of the templates offered in their library. No problem. You can create your own from scratch. This, obviously, takes a little more time both in figuring out the look and content you want and getting used to the tools provided to create it. But if you have a good design sense and time to spend developing it, you can easily create your own completely original website.
Publishing to live
Once you've created your site it's time to publish it and, once again, Apple makes this unbelievably easy. You don't have to endure the complicated process of finding a host server. There's no configuration necessary. You simply hit the "Publish" button and Apple uploads and hosts your site on their secure server, which means it won't take up space on your hard-drive.
Costs and criticisms
In order to do this, you have to be a .Mac member and, of course, that's not free. But the price is completely on par or better than what you'd pay another company to host your site. For $139 (Canadian Dollars) you get a full .Mac membership which includes 1 GB for .Mac Mail and iDisk storage, which is where your site - and your other files and documents - will be stored. Most importantly, you get the ease of creating your own site and the headache-free ability to upload it and make as many changes as you like. In other words: freedom.
The only criticism of iWeb would be the restrictions on your URL. You have to use the prefix web.mac.com before your website name. For example, you wouldn't be able to have your web address be www.ilikecats.com. It would have to be: web.mac.com/ilikecats. This is the one non-user-friendly feature as it turns your web address into a mouthful. If you must have a simple URL, you can create your website in iWeb and pay another company to host it but this can be time consuming and frustrating as there are a lot of extra steps and hoops to jump through to transfer files from a Mac to an exterior host server.
Whether you're creating a website for your small business or purely for fun, iWeb is the simple way to go, making it yet another excellent offering from Apple.
