Review: Chad Brantly’s iWeb Enhancer 1.1

• Article 20 of 89
• MacFormat, June 2006

Anyone who uses iWeb for any length of time experiences a combination of happiness and frustration. Happiness, because iWeb produces some extremely good-looking sites, but frustration because it's very restrictive for anyone who wants to add anything beyond the basic toolkit of web features iWeb offers you. So if you're an iWeb fan, iWeb Enhancer should be music to your ears: it offers you the chance to add your own custom code - HTML, JavaScript, whatever you want - to any web pages you create with iWeb, without having to use another web design package.

The program works in a simple but somewhat clunky way. Whenever you want to add some custom code to a page, just draw out a rectangle with curved corners in iWeb then add a couple of lines of text to the rectangle. In between those lines, you then copy and paste the code you want to add. Save the page, publish your site, then run iWeb Enhancer. And hey presto! Your pages magically incorporate the code into the page at the spot you specified.
That's how it should work anyway. Getting to that point isn't easy. The instructions for using the program are very brief and the Spartan interface is still surprisingly awkward. The main instructions don't mention, for instance, that if you publish to .Mac directly, you'll have to mount your iDisk and locate your iWeb site in it. Since the program doesn't work directly on your iWeb files but only on the published versions, you'll have to run iWeb Enhancer every time you make a change to one of the pages with the embedded code.

But the program does work exactly as advertised once you get the hang of it. We tried with various bits of code, including a YouTube video, and iWeb Enhancer was successfully able to add the code to our pages. While $12.95 may seem a bit expensive for something's that's essentially a batch text rewriter, if you're firmly wedded to iWeb but want to push the limits of its capabilities, iWeb Enhancer is a good investment.