iWeb 08 users guide

• Article 57 of 89
• MacFormat, November 2007

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Photo pages have also had a bit of an improvement since iWeb 1.x. Each photo page can now include up to 500 photos; obviously this could be a bit of a problem for anyone on a dial-up Internet connection, so iWeb cleverly auto-paginates the gallery – you can tell it how many photos to put on each page using the same pop-up palette that appears when you click on the photo. There’s also now a “photo detail” view in the final web page you produce, much like the one available in the new .Mac photo galleries (see box out) that allow visitors to select photos from a thumbnail strip and see them in full resolution. And viewers can now add comments to individual photos, if you decide to let them.

Each theme, old and new, comes with a “My Albums” page type in iWeb 08 to complement the existing ‘movie’ and ‘photo’ pages. When you add a “My Albums” page to your site, it appears like a folder in the site list down the side. If you drag a movie or photo album page to the folder, it will appear on the page as an animated display of all the images or movies contained in the album. Alternatively, you can drag albums, events and movies from the iLife media browser to the ‘My Albums’ page and iWeb will create a corresponding page for them in your site. Your visitors will also be able to subscribe via RSS to the ‘My Albums’ page when it’s published so that whenever you add a new gallery, they’ll know about the change.

The ‘blog’ pages are a little cleverer than the standard web page type as well. When you create a blog, you get a folder that corresponds to the main index page of the blog. Within it, there’s an archive page listing the titles of all the blog entries and an ‘Entries’ page that you use to access your blog entries. When you select it, a list of the entries will appear at the top of the editing page, from which you can add new entries and delete existing ones. If you select an entry from the list, you’ll then be able to edit its layout as you would with any other page.

Take control
Indeed, with the layouts of any page, you needn’t feel limited by what Apple has provided you with via its themes. You can drag and drop items around the web page, resizing them using their corners (holding down the shift key to ensure they maintain the right shape). To make sure everything lines up nicely, the items will try to align themselves to other objects and on-screen guides will appear to indicate appropriate alignments.

Clicking the ‘Colors’ or ‘Fonts’ icons in the toolbar will open up the standard OS X palettes and enable you to change any selected page element, upping font size, changing font, or changing the colours. The ‘Adjust’ icon works just the same as its iPhoto counterpart and allows you to change the contrast, brightness, saturation, et al of a selected image. There’s also a ‘Shapes’ button that produces a pull-down menu of squares, circles, lines and more that you can add to the web page. Clicking on the “Text Box” button will create a box into which you can add more text to your page. If you need to have items overlap, the “Forward” and “Backward” will let you pick which item is in front and which is behind.

The most powerful tool, though, is the Inspector palette, which gives you access to many advanced options, such as text wrapping, drop shadows, and hyperlinking, as well as more information about the web page itself and anything you have selected. Anything you want to do but can’t see to find a tool to do it: try the Inspector palette.

Someone else’s problem
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, with iWeb 1.x was its inability to deal with external HTML. This might not seem such a big issue at first, with iWeb’s fabulous layout tools and built-in capabilities. But unless iWeb explicitly supported a feature, you couldn’t add it to your site even if all the browsers in the world did. So that meant no YouTube, Google Maps or anything else cool, unless you were prepared to resort to iWeb Enhancer.

Now, iWeb 08 gives us a new toolbar icon, “Web Widgets”, that gets round all of that. Now you can just select “HTML Snippet” from the Web Widgets list of tools, copy and paste the HTML you want to add to your web page into a floating palette, and iWeb will add it to the page, giving you an immediate preview of what it looks like. “Web Widgets” also includes support for Google Maps, so you can add a Google Map to a page just by typing in the address you want to display, and Google AdSense (see walkthrough two). Lastly, if you have any .Mac web galleries that are publicly viewable, iWeb will automatically include them in the “Web Widgets” menu (see box out)

Publish and be praised
When you’re done creating your sites, if you have a .Mac account, you can click on the “Publish” button and iWeb will create all the necessary files for your web site and upload them to your .Mac web space. You can always tell which of your pages have been published and which need to be updated, since they’re colour-coded in your site list: red if they need to be updated, blue for up-to-date, and green for archives.

However, if you want to use iWeb to publish to another web host, you can still use iWeb’s “Publish to a folder” option and use another program, such as Transmit (www.panic.com/transmit) and CyberDuck (http://cyberduck.ch/), to upload the necessary files.

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