When I first reviewed iLife 6 in my article about creating my first podcast I was a little hard on iWeb but gave it a generally OK review. Turns out I was a little hasty! After a few more weeks of use I’ve come to the conclusion that it sucks! Yes, the interface is very nice and yes you can easily make a podcast by dragging and dropping but it still sucks because everything goes most terribly pear-shaped the moment you go to publish your web page. To see what I mean have a look at the site for the IFAS podcast which I’ve been using as a test case for iWeb: www.minds.nuim.ie/~ifas/podcast.

You might say my sample page looks alright on the surface, because it does. But, now try to highlight some text. Oops, you can’t because it isn’t in fact text but an image. Everything is in fact an image. All text everywhere. WTF! That’s not web design, it’s desktop publishing! The result is not so much a web page as a poster or flyer for printing! So much for getting indexed by search engines …. oh well, it’s not as if you publish stuff on the web for people to find and read is it …. oh wait …. bugger!

Things go even more pear-shaped when publishing though. If you remember last time I told you that you could only publish directly to the web if you had a .Mac account (which I don’t because I don’t need one). This means that you have to publish to a folder on your local machine each time you want to update the site. You might not think that’s too bad. You’d think you just publish it and then use a good SFT client like Transmit 3 to sync with the server so you only upload changed files. Well you’d be in for a nasty shock. Each time you re-publish the site everything gets re-generated so your sync will result in ALL files being uploaded again. This is inconvenient when your podcast has two episodes, positively annoying when it has three (like mine now does) and simply impossible when it has 10, 20, 30 or more.

Conclusion

The simple truth is that iWeb is totally impractical and un-usable in the long term. Nice Try Apple but absolutely no cigar this time. Version 2 had better be a major major improvement!