[boston_boy_1984]

in responce to the person who has iweb crashing it works fine on my machine but i have a ibook not a powerbook. i think for its first release iweb is a very good product any product when it is first released is not perfect and always has some problems with it. there is something that i wonder about are we able to view other peoples webpages? and if so how can we do this?

[webman2k]

Yes, PNGs are great, but these files sizes that iWeb is pushing out are inexcusable. The sample site created in theis review... the picture on the front page is almost 700k! That's just crazy. You could take the same picture, compress it in photoshop to a 60 quality JPG (still looks great) at 70k. Yes, you can do fancy things with PNG alpha channels, but the fact is not everyone's on broadband yet. Amazing things can be done with CSS and a little creativity. As a professional web developer my first goals are compatability, usability and speed. Graphics come second. I've spent a lifetime of surfing watching people complain about slowness and "why doesn't this work on my browser?" Apple, you've nailed usability, so let's see some optimizations for iWeb 2.

[tomtom]

Concerning the earlier post, I suggested Rapdiweaver as a solution to a particular need,
I do not wish to create the impression that I am anti iWeb. In fact it is great for some personal use and for particular general use situations,
Here is a post I made to an earlier Macworld article.

At first, I thought that the iWeb pages are a bit "Noddy"
Then I found that I could reformat much about them with the use of Inspector.
Then, I found that using the pages within an iFrame I could achieve things like rock solid Podcasting very quickly and easily and the resulting web pages integrate perfectly with the main site.
I now use iWeb frequently especially for Podcasting audio and video content - it just works.
Just a word on the images. Apple repurposes images in iWeb and converts .jpeg to .png to help this along. The files are much larger (3x). This is fine for Grandma with a good broadband connection but no so good for a production environment. Even the "Reflections" Theme images can benefit hugely by being exported in .jpeg format. Also, if you provide iWeb with large original image files you may end up with huge .png's. So for Grandma with speedy broadband and for production use, resize and optimize those .jpegs before giving them to iWeb. For production use, export all .png formats to .jpeg and attend to the code - this might make the use of iWeb unproductive compared to other solutions if the images are changed frequently
In summary, after my initial prejudice, I like iWeb much.

[hayesk]

In reply to:

---

pages take ages to appear in the browser and this is because a text box which would take up only 2k in HTML has been turned into an image of 164K - this may be nice and pretty, but it is slow and inefficient web authoring. Anybody knowing anything about web authoring will be appalled and, like me, immediately go back to real HTML

---

Uhm... isn't that the point. iWeb is for people who don't know anything about web authoring. Apple changed it to an image, otherwise they'd get complaints that the text doesn't look exactly the same as when they designed it.
This is an app for novices. That means there's going to be performance and efficiency tradeoffs - that should be obvious to any reasonably computer-literate person.

[rollercoaster375]

Actually, from my experiences, PNGs are more compressed than JPGs.
(Pardon the horrid-ness that is my Windows box)
http://www.sparkbomb...compression.png - Those are the compared file sizes of two images. Both were exported from an original JPG to compressed formats in their respective file sizes, but the PNG is not near as bulky.

(And for good measure, I converted that screenshot to a JPG as well, and it's also larger. http://www.sparkbomb...compression.jpg )
The original files can be found here, if you don't believe me (It's a picture of my puppy playing [Getting stuck rather] in the snow):
http://www.sparkbomb...me/P1010026.png
http://www.sparkbomb...me/P1010026.JPG

[JMA]

iWeb is a 1.0 product, so of course it has its flaws. But a few of its glitches may really aggravate more than a few of the newbie users for which it's intended.
First off, publishing with iWeb over dial-up -- still popular with lots of grandparents, among others -- is sketchy: Several times, iWeb reported that re-publication of pages was successful -- and switched the Site Organizer icons for those pages from red to blue, indicating they wouldn't be updated on the next "Publish" cycle -- but it never applied the intended edits to the live pages on .Mac. (As an aside, a broadband connection isn't listed as a requirement for iWeb or .Mac, but it should be: Aside from these iWeb issues, using a dial-up connection, or even a contended broadband connections, as in a busy hotspots, iDisk transfers often fail on medium-to-large files.)
Another nettlesome iWeb feature: A "Visit" button becomes available at the bottom of the iWeb window once a page has been published (it's grayed out for unpublished pages), but it opens a Safari window for the homepage of the site you're working on -- not necessarily the specific page you're editing in iWeb. This is numbingly nonintuitive: Grandma can learn that she's got to click the navigation link for the intended page once she visits the homepage, but why should she need to?
And heaven help her if she ever tries to visit a page for which she's unchecked (accidentally or intentionally) the default "Include page in navigation menu" option in the iWeb Inspector. Site homepages contain no links to such pages, and the "Visit" workaround is unwieldy for savvy users, let alone newbies: If the desired page is in your default site (uppermost in the Site Organizer list), simply type a slash after the homepage URL, followed by the title of the intended page and ".html". And of course remember to substitute "%20" for any spaces in the title. If the page isn't in the uppermost site in Site Organizer, just replace the title of the visited homepage with that of the target page. What could be easier? /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif
A final gripe, concerning something it'll probably take newbie users a while to run up against: the iWeb image-masking feature. This tool, which lets you hide part of a photo and display the remainder as a page element, is a great idea, but its behavior is frustrating. To apply a mask, you select an image and press the "Mask" button. The image is grayed out, except for a rectangular dotted-line "window" at its center, equipped with familar resize handles. Click-drag the handles to isolate the the portion of the image you want to be visible, click outside the image, and the mask is applied. You can now select, move and resize the masked image like any other graphic. Great. But if your mask is a little too long (wide, tall, etc.) there's no way to reactivate and tweak your mask: All you can do is click the re-labeled "Unmask" button to delete your mask and reveal the full image, then press "Mask" again to get a brand-new active mask, once again centered on the original (unmasked) image. Even if all you want is to nudge one edge of your mask a few pixels, you must instead start all over to reshape a new mask -- and pray you'll be more precise than the first time. Arg.
All in all, iWeb does a lot of ambitious things very well, but it needs a little more polish before it can be the simple, painless Web-publishing tool it aspires to be.
Cheers,
Jim

[vchmielewski]

I've found that the PNG files produced by iWeb are about 4 times larger than a comparible JPG. There is an easy was to get around this though. I simply add the JPGs version to the appropiate folder, then edit the code produced by iWeb to reference the JPG file. It's an easy fix.

[jonhoyle]

Anyone remember the old Claris HomePage? It was clearly the easiest, simplest way to create cool web pages, with templates and built in FileMaker integration. Essentially, you build your web page as easily as you might create a Word or PageMaker document, with easy switching to raw HTML view if needs be. The product is of course dead now (and doesn't support modern standards), but I have been hoping for an OS X equivalent.
For those who are familiar with Claris HomePage, is iWeb the best choice today?
Thanks in advance,
Jonathan Hoyle

[Nobody]

Good point, there seems an absense of programs for web publishing at this level.
One clear distinction is that iWeb Templates are, for the time being, Apple only monopolies. There is no clear or easy way to create your own templates and add them to iWeb.

[webman2k]

That's all well and good, but I'm talking about web images. There's no way you'd put that picture in either format up for web viewing. There are certain things PNG is good for. Each fomat (JPG, GIF, or PNG) is strong for certain things. As far as photographs are concerned, I think you get the best bang for your bandwidth using JPG. A JPG compressed at 60 or 55 or so creates a decent looking but very quick loading image for web viewing. Remember, we're not talking about what looks best, we're l=talking about what looks best given the file size.

[joetaxpayer]

"Not to come off as a creep, but this isn't a support site it's a news/reviews site."
uh, these boards are just for that purpose as well. This particular thread is in the review folder, so at worst, the OP was just in the wrong area, but the right boards.
JOE /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[whitedog]

I tested iWeb with a simple bog site, Sounding Off, starting out with just two pages. Then I saved to a local folder inside the existing local version of my web site. I could have uploaded the folder with any FTP client, but chose to open the files in Dreamweaver first to see what the iWeb code looked like (The file and folder structure is surprisingly complex. iWeb changed only my title text to images, however). Then I uploaded the blog pages to my site with Dreamweaver. When I wanted to make changes, I opened the site again in iWeb and saved the changes right over the previous version in the local folder. Thus I avoided having to deal with the proprietary archive format that iWeb uses to save sites in the ~/Library/Applications Support/iWeb folder. In fact, till it was mentioned in this discussion, I didn't know such a file existed.
Of course all this rigmarole would be beyond the novice user for whom iWeb is designed, but, like others posting here, I was curious to look under the hood. I haven't tried it yet, but I assume that, if I built another site, however iWeb keeps track of it, if I save it independently to disk, it would be a discreet folder from the first one and I could manage it separately using the ftp client of my choice.
While iWeb won't replace Dreamweaver for me, it does have some nice templates and I'm sure I'll use it from time to time for quick and (not so) dirty site design. More important, I now have a program to recommend to friends who have a hankering to make their own web sites, but don't have the time or energy to learn HTML or a heavy duty app like Dreamweaver.

[dewarner]

I have used iWeb since its release, and find it extremely easy to work with. It is clear that it is not designed to be a full feature web page editor. Instead, it lets you easily integrate your interests and content and quickly share them on the web.
If you look at some of the sites that have been created with this app, you will be amazed at what is possible. A growing list is available on Apple Discussions. The site offered by the author as an example represents the lower end of what is possible.
I am hopeful that the next release will address many of the issues listed including iWeb's inconsistent results with different web browsers and operating systems.

[csyria]

My main issue with iWeb is that you can't effectively have multiple projects going at once if you are a non-.Mac user and you are advanced.
For example, a friend asked me to make them a quick website. It was fast and dirty, but now every time I export the page I'm working on, I get theirs in the folder I made for iWeb exports too. I don't really want to delete it in case I want to make a change later on.
Also, in this same way, when I export I get code I have to change by hand because they reference absolute links that aren't necessary. For example, the RSS file for a podcast I made, when exported, is 4 directories deep. Instead of trying to edit it so that I could have it in the root of my site, I found it easier to just make my own XML file based on the example on Apple's site in TextWrangler.
Obviously, the fact that it can't easily work with multiple but separate sites causes lots of problems if you are even semi-advanced. At least I can see a way to hack in this functionality by moving the data file for iWeb around if I ever need to.
Another issue I see is that iWeb wastes images. Each page has its own copies of the navigation bar, both before and after. One of my sites uses 5 navigation buttons, so between all the pages that uses them, that's about 200kb trashed on navigation buttons.
Also, I am displeased with the choice to use PNG. Every picture on my pages that is a PNG is huge, losing a large percentage of its size when I take it into a JPEG format.
Sadly, I feel that iWeb, in this stage for people like me, may go unused because of its severe limitations and flaws (yes, I feel such waste is a flaw).