Simple Critics

Apple iWeb ‘08: The Right Choice for Blogs

iWeb ‘08 came out for OS X in the fall of 2007 and was a solid upgrade to the previous iWeb edition which is part of the excellent iLife suite. The new version fixed some of the problems the old version had and added a few nice features. I’ll list some of my favorite features and even a few gripes after the jump.

I have been using iWeb for over two years now and enjoy using it for its simplicity and amazing integration with other iLife and iWork Applications. That being said, it’s definitely not a power blogger application. It’s not for everyone and you can get a lot of the features iWeb offers for free on other websites. However, for its intended users, it’s a very well designed program.

First off, the price is a steal. The entire iLife suite comes for free on all Macs or just $79 for an upgrade. iLife also includes other amazing pieces of software including, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, Garageband. If you were to price these individually, that would mean iWeb only costs about $16. I dare you to go out and find a cheaper software suite this good. Apple is often criticized for being too expensive (and often times that is legit), but this is one of the rare times that Apple offers you a bargain.

Here is the simplified workflow of a typical iWeb page…
1. Choose a website name and theme
2. Create a main page (I like using the “blog” pages)
3. Start your first blog entry
4. Drag a photo from iPhoto to the placeholder on your iWeb blog entry page
5. Publish (if you have mobile me), or save to a folder to upload to your own host

It’s that easy! iWeb takes care of all the other details.

As I mentioned above, iWeb ‘08 brought some cool features to the table. Here are some of the best:

HTML Snippets - You can finally have html snippets. Seems like a no brainer if you have used any of the free web blogging services. You are now able to go out and get any html code and paste it into iWeb to display the embedded info. This works great with YouTube, for example. While this is a very nice feature, it feels like this should have been done before in a software update. It’s not really a “new feature” like it is being touted by Apple, but it is a welcomed edition.

Album Pages - In the old iWeb, if you wanted to have a photo album page, you had to create them yourself on a blank page and take a photo to represent your album and then add a link that would take you to your actual photo page. This was often very time consuming. You had to manually manage the size of your thumbnail and add hyperlinks to other pages. In iWeb ‘08, they now have an actual template page called Album. It essentially streamlines and automates the album creation process. Have an album in iPhoto you want to share? Simply drag the album to the drop location in your Album page and you are done. You have an album and a linked page to the actual photos. You can edit the look and effects for the album (like skimming on or off). Very nice feature.

Theme Switching - This is another great new feature but it also feels like it should have been done before now. Before iWeb ‘08, if you wanted to change your theme to another template, you had to save all the text, create a new page using a new template, and then paste. A huge pain. Now, if you get tired of your current theme and want to switch it over to another theme, you can by just picking a new theme. iWeb automatically takes your existing content and converts it over to the new selected template.

Speaking of themes, Apple has added some very nice new themes. There is now a total of 26 themes to choose from, 8 new ones for iWeb ‘08. The only problem I have encountered with these themes is that although they look great and professional, it comes at the cost of slow loading times. The nicer and more complex the theme, the longer it takes to load up correctly on the web. That’s a real shame. I want a great looking site but not at the cost of people have to wait for it to load.

Google Features - Apple has added the ability to include Google Maps and Google Adsense into your website. The Google Maps feature is great if you want to add directions or show a location of a place on a map. You have complete control of the map too so you can view satellite view, regular map view, or hybrid views as well as grab the map and move it around. Adsense is a way to embed ads to your blog and get paid for it.

iWeb works best with Apple’s Mobile Me service. The services costs $99 per year and includes other benefits other then web hosting. You don’t HAVE to have Mobile Me, but to use iWeb ‘08 and publish with one click, you need to have it. You can always save your website to a folder and publish to a third party web host but that can be tedious and complicated compared to the simplicity of one click publishing.

Those are all the new features in iWeb ‘08 that “simple” people like me use. The rest of iWeb is still the same which is a good thing because the layout and usability of the program is great. You can manage different websites and publish with one click (if you use Mobile Me). And there is pretty much nothing you can’t figure out by just playing around with it for a few hours. I have only had to consult the help menu a few times and everything is simple to understand.

With that being said, iWeb is not for everyone…check out Mr. Bobblehead’s views on iWeb.

Flycough

Tags: Apple, Blog, Mac, Review, Software   Posted in Reviews