It was time to do it – my home domain had got into a real mess – so time to rebuild. I am not a programmer, and the site is nothing more than some fun – and a place to put stuff and amalgamate all of the various threads of my online world – so simplicity was the order of the day.
I am also a big fan of Apple – so I thought – why not ?
iWeb – here I come.
I am just about there – and for those that are interested – some 60 or so pages of WIP can be found here.
Here’s the thing though – I went into this knowing that it was never going to be as good as building a site with a real CMS – think Drupal or Joomia – and I didn’t want to do go up the learning curve for something like Dreamweaver – or even Contribute, that I have used in the past – so on the face of it iWeb is just right … no ?
Well – it depends.
Going through the process I documented a few really big annoyances that I think would make iWeb a lot better. If you have something to throw in the fray – please add your comments, including if you know any good workarounds. If this turns into anything substantial – I might just pop down to Cupertino to see if I can get an audience – any votes on my chances, or if they’ll listen ?
Ok – so here goes.
Sub Menus
There is just no easy way to do add a sub menu – so once you get beyond 6 or 7 pages – either your menu starts to wrap around the top – or you have to add in manual links to the extra pages.
Create Once – Use Many
No way to create a piece of content and reuse it many times. Say on a hidden page you could create some copy that through some kind of include – or pointer allows that copy to appear in many different places on the site … kind of like this in a ‘real’ site :
Header and Footers
Footers and Headers should be able to be set and appear same way on every page as default – with option to change page by page – section by section.
SEO
SEO – there really is no allowance for it at all. Now I am not going to get all fussed and fluffed around this – but how hard would it be to include routines to – there is simply no way to readily accommodate good SEO practice – is there ?
Page Naming
Any page has a single name – so what i call it in the iweb navigation is what it is called in the visible navigation – is what it reads in the browser when the site is visited – why not allow the builder to create page names for easier navigation in iweb – have a user friendly name for inclusion in navigation – and a fuller more descriptive name that appears in the browser ?
All of this could be done with page properties
Page Properties
And while we are on that topic – why not also – for each page have the ability to add meta tags for description, keywords and robots ? These could be set up as a default site entry – and then overwritten by the site builder as needed – or not at all.
iWeb Navigation
wouldn’t it be good to have the possibility to folder pages in the iweb nav – much as the photos pages work – but all pages – and while we are at it – did you know that if you wanted to publish (say) ../me/index.htm into two different sub directories on your main site – you can’t. Why ? Because you can’t have two sites in iweb both called me !
Finally – if anyone out there says I am wrong – and I just don’t know what I am doing – please let me know – and point me at the resource that gets around these challenges.