Apple's iWeb

[Walt Calahan]

Just got Apple Computer's new iLife '06 software bundle. In it is a wonderful program for designing web sites called iWeb.

The program is limited in scope compared to full featured web design programs, but working in its limits, it makes a nice web site. Once you've created a site in iWeb, the design can be imported into GoLive or other full featured programs. You don't have to have an iMac account to publish the site to the internet.

Here's my latest web site design to promote my photography so you can see how I got iWeb to work for me.

http://www.walterpcalahan.com

[Eric Biggerstaff]

Walt,

Looks great and thanks for the link. Your work is beautiful but I could not enlarge the iamges when I clicked on them. Congrats on the lovely work and site.

[Mark Woods]

Hey Walt,

I built my website with iWeb. I really like the program. Here's the link to my site: http://markwoods.com/

Enjoyed your site. Great work!

MW

[Marko]

Very nice looking site, Walt. And beautiful work indeed!

It's a little slowish, but otherwise worked fine for me in Safari. iWeb looks like a nice little web app for personal homepages and such, and it is even valid XHTML with tableless layout. The only gripe I might have with it - and that's speaking professionally, not as a user - is that it writes all styles inline instead of using a separate stylesheet. But make no mistake, it is only a little clumsy, but it is technically valid and it seems to be much better than anything else in its class.

And you really squeezed the most out of it.

[Walt Calahan]

Eric

Try again. I had to up load the slideshow html again, and you might have got stuck when the up load was happening. I forgot to change the default background color of the slideshow from Apple's white to a more pleasing, to my eye, gray.

Mark

Thanks for your URL. I remember looking at your site before to learn about your film career. You've master iWeb better than me by getting photos to work as buttons to lead the viewer to another page. Something I want to do later. Enjoyed your work very much.

Thanks to both of you for the kind works about my work.

[Ron Marshall]

Great site, but quite slow to load the thumbnails on my computer (DSL).

[Walt Calahan]

Ron

I'm using DSL also, and the new design loads about the same speed as my old site. I do appreciate the feedback 'cause a friend with a cable modem said the same thing.

Referring to Marko's posting about the way iWeb writes its code, that might be the problem. Since I'm not a coder, I have no idea. I'm forced to use the program the way Apple makes it.

Perhaps future updates to iWeb will speed things up. Also the first time I opened my site the browser took some time putting it into cache. After that it picked up speed on return visits.

Again, I'm just speculating on the "why's" 'cause I don't really know why you experienced a slow down.

At least people who can't hire a professional designer can use this inexpensive program for a simple site (iLife in which iWeb is bundled is only $79!).

[Frank Petronio]

The slideshow isn't valid code but the rest is - this might be the kind of app my daughter needs - thanks for the tip.

[Marko]

Walt,

Another thing to pay attention to is the image sizes, especially for thumbnails. There's a lot of them on a single page and every little bit counts. With the size you have, your thumbnails shouldn't be more than 4KB each, less if possible. Thumbnails are there for indication only, and they should be "squeezed" compression-wise as much as possible. Large images are another matter, but people should expect big files there.

[Walt Calahan]

Marko, thanks for that tip. I'll resize the thumbnails in PhotoShop and reload to the site. That should speed thing up.

Frank, isn't the slideshow opening for you? Or is the code not up to a true programmer's specs?

iWeb is definitely an amateur web design tool. Great for kids and people like me with limited brain power for computers.