My parents wanted to put together a website to show the work they’ve been doing on the farm. Since they have a Mac I had a quick play with iWeb and found it was very usable.

I showed my parents how to write up the site and publish it. A process that was a lot harder with older versions of iWeb.

A little while later my sister wanted to set up a website to put stories of her travels on for family and friends to read about. Again I recommended iWeb to her as she has a Mac and wanted to do things simply.

I’ve always written my websites by hand with my text editor of choice vi. This of course means that the development process is slow at first. Though with some of the site’s I’ve put together over time the process of adding new content has been very quick once a framework was put together.

Then came along the pressure of putting together a blog. I resisted the urge for until a month ago and decided move a little more with the flock.

But what product to use? I could do what I’ve always done and write it up from scratch. After some thinking and procrastination, mostly in an effort to put off writing a blog. I decided I should practice what I preach and use iWeb. After all, why shouldn’t I. I has all the editing ability that I’d need to put together a site and the overhead and constraints it puts on how the site is but together aren’t that bad. are they?...

Well my initial thoughts were that there were too many overheads with what iWeb compiled.

My initial complaint is that you can’t (yet) specify that you don’t want your website to be under a specific directory. There are ways around this however and you can pretty much make it work as you want.

Getting started... my first instinct was to start with a blank page and build it up as I wanted. This worked just as expected and the result was okay. Though I think it wasn’t as good as it could have been due to lack of motivation.

Step two... take a look at the existing templates...

The thing I like about using the in built templates when working on a page is that you can change to another template and your content is all changed.

The thing I don’t like about using the templates is that if you change to another template any text boxes and other objects that you’ve added to the page aren’t completely changed to the new template format.

For the moment at least the built in templates in iWeb have won me over.