The Author – Bart Busschots
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May
21
On Second Thoughts – iWeb Sucks
Filed Under Computers & Tech on May 21, 2006 at 10:01 pm
When I first reviewed iLife 6 in my article about creating my first podcast I was a little hard on iWeb but gave it a generally OK review. Turns out I was a little hasty! After a few more weeks of use I’ve come to the conclusion that it sucks! Yes, the interface is very nice and yes you can easily make a podcast by dragging and dropping but it still sucks because everything goes most terribly pear-shaped the moment you go to publish your web page. To see what I mean have a look at the site for the IFAS podcast which I’ve been using as a test case for iWeb: www.minds.nuim.ie/~ifas/podcast.
You might say my sample page looks alright on the surface, because it does. But, now try to highlight some text. Oops, you can’t because it isn’t in fact text but an image. Everything is in fact an image. All text everywhere. WTF! That’s not web design, it’s desktop publishing! The result is not so much a web page as a poster or flyer for printing! So much for getting indexed by search engines …. oh well, it’s not as if you publish stuff on the web for people to find and read is it …. oh wait …. bugger!
Things go even more pear-shaped when publishing though. If you remember last time I told you that you could only publish directly to the web if you had a .Mac account (which I don’t because I don’t need one). This means that you have to publish to a folder on your local machine each time you want to update the site. You might not think that’s too bad. You’d think you just publish it and then use a good SFT client like Transmit 3 to sync with the server so you only upload changed files. Well you’d be in for a nasty shock. Each time you re-publish the site everything gets re-generated so your sync will result in ALL files being uploaded again. This is inconvenient when your podcast has two episodes, positively annoying when it has three (like mine now does) and simply impossible when it has 10, 20, 30 or more.
Conclusion
The simple truth is that iWeb is totally impractical and un-usable in the long term. Nice Try Apple but absolutely no cigar this time. Version 2 had better be a major major improvement!
[…] On Second Thoughts – iWeb Sucks […]
You’re an idiot.
You either…
1) Assigned text to an image object (such as a shape) thus the result will be an image anyway.
2) Assigned image properties to a text object (such as shadowing or rotation) which don’t render in browsers and are thus converted to images.
3) Used a font outside the default range of fonts (such as something obscure on your mac). So it looks the same on the other end, it converts it to an image.
You’re an idiot for not figuring this out sooner.
While iWeb DOES suck, it also (strangely) rocks. iWeb Enhancer lets you stick custom code directly into objects and with iWeb 2, you’ll be doing the same but your objects will grow with their content (thus throwing together say, a database enabled site will be a breeze).
Hi b,
I didn’t do 1, 2, or 3. All I did was choose one of Apple’s few standard templates and replace their place-holder text with my real text. That was it. Nothing more. And it produced rubbish.
Considering the market iWeb is aimed at what I did is exactly what most of its users will do. If it gave me crap code, it will give them crap code too!
iWeb is a very poor application, simple as that.
I’m exploring iWeb. I found that i cannot make a second website appart from a first one. The second one always nests under the first one. Can abybody help me trough this problem.
Kind regards
Hi Gabriel,
I’m not sure this is the best place to get help with iWeb since this post is all about how much I hate it 🙂
I’d suggest posting your question on the support forums on Apple’s website. I’ve gotten a lot of help on those forums over the years.
Bart.
iWeb does suck. I can see it being great for a beginner who just wants a decent-looking website for personal use. My myself, even though I’m a beginner at web design, iWeb’s already become extremely frustrating. I want to use WordPress for my blog, and since I’m using MobileMe for hosting, this isn’t possible. Being a graphic designer, I want my site to showcase my abilities, and iWeb doesn’t make it easy to customize things.
I think I’m going to switch over to GoDaddy hosting or something when my MobileMe trial runs out. And make a basic site it Dreamweaver, with a WordPress blog. That seems like less headache to me.
Hi,
I also think IWeb sucks. For one thing, it is impossible to cancel your subscription. I’ve been trying to do that for the last three weeks. The passwords I am given don’t work, or I do everything right and am told everything has been cancelled and then I am billed for the next three months anyway. Now I am told I need to justify my not wanting to continue with IWeb, as if all that I’ve just described wasn’t enough of a reason to NEVER want to be an IWeb client again. I’ve found it completely useless anyway.
Lola
iWeb 06 may have sucked but iWeb 08 is OK – especially if you use it with Multisite for iWeb.
I’m just experimenting with some mockups at the moment.
N
just chiming in to note that iWeb ’09 sucks donkey balls. go search on how to change a freakin’ page title in iWeb. you’ll find lots of hyper-complicated explanations that i haven’t been able to make work. why should you embed a snip of Java to simply title a fucking page? it’s ridiculous.
and if you go in and change the source code by hand, to put in the title you want using another program… well, when you come back later iWeb doesn’t let you load up the project.
Having previously used Claris Home Page, I thought iWeb would be an update of that … WRONG.
iWeb is soooo bad. Apple should be embarrassed!
But then I thought Apple Mail would be an update of Claris Emailer but I was wrong there too. At least it doesn’t suck as badly as iWeb.