iWeb. A phenominal looking dissapointment.

As you may have read I recently purchased a new Mac. It has been pretty nice. There are a few things here and there that remind me why I keep Linux around.

My wife and I decided we were going to put together a family webpage with all of our family pictures, a family blog, an about us page, and perhaps some videos. I fire up my iMac and open up iWeb. At first I was extremely impressed and exited for the iWeb css themes and styles. It is easy to put pages together and they look great. So I published my webpage to a folder and then uploaded it to my cableone page. There was a few major issues

• The menu bar did not function. There were no buttons at all leading to any content on the webpage.
• All pages were added to the menu bar. I don't want or need all pages in the menu bar.
  
• The pictures page, which uses javascript, does not work properly.
• I could not organize my pictures how I wanted them. I want to organize them by year and then by album. Not all albums on the same page. This would also apply to videos.
  
• The Blog feature only allowed for one picture to be easily embedded in a blog post.
• RSS feeds only work with an Apple .Mac account.
  

After a little research I found out that these problems do not exist if you use the .Mac (dot mac) web hosting provided by Apple. I fireup Firefox and head on over to Apple's website to learn more about .Mac . The .Mac account will cost someone just under $100 per year. For this price your web page will work as it is designed to in iWeb. But what really kills .Mac is that it comes with a very dismal 10GB of storage. Just for comparison Google mail gives 6.5GB just for e-mail! So because I have 14GB of pictures alone .Mac is out of the question.

After looking around at the most "top rated" hosting services I have found that Bluehost or Hostmonster are considered the most user friendly and best priced. They both happen to be owned by the same company. These web hosts offer 1,500GB of storage, a free domain name, hosting unlimited domains, POP3 and IMAP email, FTP accounts, web based email, secure shell access (SSH - I love ssh), log files, site stats, wordpress, PHP5, poll and survey software...the list goes on and only for the price of roughly $160 for two years.
As you can see, compared to .Mac the features are like a gang of thugs beating the crap out of some artsy fartsy. The only drawback this has compared to .Mac is the amount of bandwidth transfer data per month. HostMonster only gives 15,000GB of data transfer every month (which is still a phenomenal amount). Apple's .Mac doesn't specify the amount of data transfer allowed monthly so I assume it is unlimited.

So because iWeb depends so heavily on being tied into a .Mac account it makes itself useless to me. This is why iWeb is such a great looking disappointment. I even decided to dig into the iWeb html and css files to modify it. I was in for a huge surprise. iWeb's generated css and html are terrible. Good luck on figuring out what code displays what image or text. So I leave iWeb with a terrible distaste for a part of the iLife suite.

So long iWeb, and adieu.