iWeb – Perfect Web Authoring for Musicians?
I have been web authoring for about ten years now, and I have recently realised that though I sometimes enjoy it, often I struggle with the knowledge upkeep it requires. It seems every few minutes there’s some important development which changes everything. There are different languages to keep up with, different platforms to deal with, different applications to use, and basically too many variables to contend with. My needs are like those of most musicians, and many other artists; I just need to be be able to create a simple site which I can edit easily and upload without too much hassle. I also want to be able to create a web site which I can give to someone and allow them to take ownership of, rather than having to constantly update for them. Mostly, these days, if someone asks me to make them a web site, I want to be able to say, “go make it yourself” and give them a solution which is self explanatory.
So what would that solution be? Well, it just might be the app I create this site in; iWeb
iWeb is free with every new Mac sold, or you can buy it as part of iLife for $79. It’s easy to use, and dare I say it, even fun. It comes with a bunch of decent templates, and you can pretty much drag any image onto your page and resize it, rotate it, add a shadow or an outline, and forget about it. Same with video and audio. Provided you have a .Mac account uploading your site is a one button affair. And creating a blog like this is easy. Many musicians may already have a Mac anyway, so there’s may be no outlay, or than a .Mac account and a domain name! It’s a no brainer!
So, what do you do if you want to create a web site in iWeb?
1 – Make sure you have iWeb, and a Mac that can run it. You’ll need OS X of course, but most likely you’ll need the latest version, currently 10.4. If you don’t have iWeb, go to apple.com and buy iLife.
2 – You’ll need a domain name. Try godaddy.com, where you can buy cheap domains.
3 Web space. If you know what you’re doing, buy some from somewhere like lunarpages.com. If you don’t, just buy a .Mac account; it’s overpriced and a bit slow, but for ease of use it’s worth it. Then, you can set your domain to forward to your web space.
4 – Start editing and uploading! It’s really that simple!
Of course, there are some disadvantages to iWeb, but it doesn’t stink of version 1.0 too much. If any of the following are dealbreakers, forget about it and try something else. For me, I can live with the issues (for now).
1 – Verbose script and big images
Yes, the script output from iWeb is verbose and the images not as highly compressed as you’d like. That means that the files iWeb outputs can be a bit long-winded and thus take longer to download.
2 – Explorer 6 hates it
IE6 hates iWeb sites, especially the menus it creates. That does suck a bit. IE 7 is better though.
3 – Similar look across iWeb sites
iWeb sites do tend to look similar, though it’s currently a very fashionable look. For example, using horizontal menus rather than vertical ones is quite “in”.
4 – Templates are a bit limiting
You can create your own, but it’s time consuming. There are some new template makers out there though, so keep looking around. Try 11mystics.com, the most successful template maker to date. Lamiavia is also producing nice templates. They do tend to stick to the horizontal menu structure, but some do use vertical menus. The templates are pretty cheap too.
5 – Some simple functionality missing
There are some great features in iWeb; the blogmaker is stupidly easy to use; the image editing and colouring features are brilliant; the search blog function is cool; the way new pages are automatically added to menus makes reorganising your site a breeze. But there are some dumbass things as well; not being able to make hyperlinks open new tabs or windows is annoying; there’s no simple way to create submenus, which sucks; you can’t just choose one file to upload – it insists on uploading all files in every site. These are all quite annoying.
6 – .Mac is slow
Sometimes deathly slow! But of course, you don’t have to use .Mac.
7 – No way to convert html into iWeb format
If you already have a site, and want to make it iWeb compatible, it’s a complete rewrite. I’ve done it, and it’s a pain. The people at Lamiavia offers a service to do it, but understandably, it’s not cheap.
OK, that might seem like a lot of negatives, but none of them are total dealbreakers for me, and of course I hope that Apple will deal with these issues in version 2. If you think they make iWeb a no-no for you, there are some options:
1 – Rapidweaver
This is a nice application which is very like iWeb, but adds some functionality (while taking other stuff away). For example, it doesn’t limit one-touch publishing to .Mac. It also comes with a huge array of templates. It’s pretty good, and very cheap. See RealMacSoftware’s site for more details.
2 – Sandvox
Similar idea here. Loads of templates, very easy to use and pretty cheap. See Karelia’s site for information.
3 – NVU
An open source web authoring application. Check out nvu.com.
4 – Dreamweaver or Frontpage
For most people’s purposes, they are clunky, overspecced and overpriced. If you want to create a simple and elegant web site and you don’t have much knowledge, stay away!
Hopefully, this will help some musicians out there thinking about creating their own sites.