There are several web design programs on the market that allow anyone, whether they have any previous experience with web design or HTML, to design quality websites for their business or personal use. One of the easiest to use is Apple’s iWeb for Mac OS X.
Although Frontpage and Dreamweaver are both easy to use, iWeb is even easier. It is completely graphical and contains a number of great looking templates pre-installed. Just about anyone will be able to find a design they like without having to write a single line of code or design anything themselves. That means that all users have to do to build their website is select what type of page they would like to make, select what image they will like to use, and input their content. iWeb makes it easy to input all types of content from images to text to video. iWeb will automatically resize and format this content for optimal viewing, saving you from having to create thumbnails for everything manually. You can even place Google Adsense ads on your website with just a couple of clicks.
iWeb is designed to be used in conjunction with Apple’s .Mac service. .Mac is an online companion for your Mac that includes a variety of features from web hosting to email to an archive and remote access for your files. When you design a website with iWeb, all you have to do is click “publish” and iWeb will publish that website to your .Mac account. By default, your web address will be a subdomain of the Mac website, but you can use your own domain if you have one.
Unfortunately, iWeb does not give you much control over your website. You cannot edit the HTML code directly and you must publish either to a .Mac account or to a folder. If you want to use iWeb to edit your site that is hosted with a different web hosting provider, you will have to publish the website to a folder, manually edit all of the links with a separate program, and publish with that separate program. Obviously, that is a time consuming process. You can get around it by just publishing to .Mac, but accounts cost $100 per year, which is a little pricey if you are using it just for hosting.
iWeb, part of the iLife suite, is a great product for people with little or no experience with web design to publish websites with their personal blogs, family photos, etc. but it may not be right for the web professional who needs to be able to control every aspect of the website. You may be able to design something that looks really nice with iWeb, but if you cannot get it to work like you need it to, what good is it?
