iWeb

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iWeb
Developed by Apple Inc.
Latest release 3.0.1 / 2009-03-26; 8 days ago
Operating system Mac OS X
Type Multimedia Internet publishing
License Proprietary
Website http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/

iWeb is a WYSIWYG template-based website creation tool made by Apple Inc. and included with its Macintosh computers. It was released during the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, California on January 10, 2006 as part of the iLife '06 creativity suite. The latest version (3.0) was released as part of the iLife '09 suite on January 6, 2009. iWeb creates websites and blogs, and publishes them via Apple's MobileMe and other webhosting services.

According to independent research from Opera Software, iWeb has a high W3C validation rate when when compared with other WYSIWYG HTML tools. All other tools failed to give more than 4%, when iWeb gave an 81% rate. [1]

Contents

[edit] Overview and features

iWeb is a website and blog creation tool. The end-user does not need to have any knowledge of Web languages in order to effectively use the product.

The features of iWeb include:

  • Apple-designed templates
  • Easy website creation
  • An iLife media browser
  • Drag and drop support for media files
  • Blogging in a limited sense
  • Podcasting
  • One-click MobileMe publishing (non-MobileMe users can publish sites to a folder, then upload with third-party FTP services.)

iWeb is currently in its third version, and has a limited feature set and some unresolved bugs. Some limitations include:

  • Creates different CSS files for each page instead of one central file to save disk space
  • Templates dictate the HTML with little control over the final output (e.g., difficult to add Google Analytics tracking code).
  • No password support on non-MobileMe user webpages
  • Limited number of templates; new templates difficult to make
  • Limited features for non-MobileMe users

Some of the these features may be included in the future.

On August 7, 2007 iWeb 08 was released as part of iLife '08

  • New features added to iWeb '08 include:
    • More Apple-designed templates
    • Options to use personal domain names for MobileMe users
    • Ability to add widgets, including Google Maps and Google Ad-sense
    • Album view with "Skimming"
    • Web 2.0 Slideshow for MobileMe and non-MobileMe users

On January 6, 2009 iWeb 09 was released as part of iLife '09

  • New features added to iWeb '09 include:
    • More widgets, including countdowns, YouTube and iSight integration
    • Publish your site directly to an FTP server
    • Facebook notifications
    • Newly Apple-designed templates

[edit] Extending iWeb

As the iWeb community is quite large, hacks and tricks have been found to still implement the missing features mentioned above (and more). Several developers have created applications which ease the process of getting those missing features:

  • iTweak — An all-around tool for implementing search fields, hitcounters, contact-forms, favicons, Haloscan commenting, password-protection for non-MobileMe sites and several other minor things.
  • iMap — A sitemap creation tool which also supports the addition of Meta-Tags.
  • iWeb SEO Tool — A free tool that lets you prepare an iWeb based website for search engines.
  • iWebBuddy — A tool to manage several domain files for iWeb and the addition of Mint or Google Analytics hitcounters as well as the modification of RSS feeds.
  • iWebSites — iWebSites can split, fuse and manage several domain files for your iWeb site.

Additionally, several designers have brought new iWeb templates:

[edit] References

  1. ^ MAMA: W3C validator research (October 15, 2008)

[edit] External links

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