Part of the ‘I Made The Switch’ website

This is the first site I’ve built with iWeb for Mac, part of iLife. It’s perhaps the 80th site I’ve built if you include the ones I coded myself with Notepad or in Dreamweaver. I’d like to think I am not new at this, though I will admit I’ve not coded a stylesheet by hand since 2005 or thereabouts. I’m very, very lazy, so I use editors, WordPress and readymade templates. (Not that I mind all that much: iWeb will be retired anyway. It was last updated for iLife ’11 but won’t be back in future versions of iLife.)

As part of my effort to give those who consider moving from Windows to Apple Mac some unbiased information, i made this website. This list about iWeb is strictly personal and some of the problems I indicate may have simple solutions. It is just a rant, basically.

iWeb has problems with:

1. -Adding decent page titles. Basically, you have to cheat to get unique page titles or live with a different masthead on each page.
   

2. -Using meta keywords and descriptions
   

3. -iWeb can embed Ad-sense. This is nice. It hardly ever works. This is bad.
   

- Click a weblink in iWeb and it opens it a browser. Very sensible, I mean: what are the odds you’d want to edit that link?

1. -Interactivity. It’s all static. Want a comment-section or guestbook? You’ll have to use an iframe. And that’s not an Apple-thing, despite the lower case i. It’s mid 90’s web technology!
   

2. -iWeb can’t handle it if you create a site in a different language than the setting of your Mac. My Mac is set to Dutch, iWeb’s spellchecker thinks I’ve had a seizure when I work on this site.
   

3. -Can’t use a - in a page title, because that won’t come across in the url and iWeb will happily publish a site that is then broken.
   

So in a way I’m glad they’re pulling the plug on that, seeing as how Apple can’t be bothered to make it a decent bit of software.