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This version of my website was created on my MacBook using iWeb with the substantial (and ongoing) technical help of my friend Lisa Lees. I would  have to say iWeb is technically easy to use in a day-to-day sense, if you have a fearless friend like Lisa to hold your hand now and then and to make happen what iWeb can’t do. But warning: iWeb is, in my experience, an unstable program that requires far more calls to AppleCare than it should.

Because of problems mastering design and converting to a new server in Drupal, I gave up Drupal and started using iWeb in 2006. I did OK for a while. Then in September of 2007, I upgraded to the new version of iWeb (with an iLife upgrade) and my site tanked because of the upgrade. It got all messed up the same day I was on Oprah...ouch! What timing! I won’t go into details on just how ugly the “upgrade” got. Let’s just say I don’t want to ever go through it again, which is why I’ve updated this whole site to a new template that I hope Apple will continue to support in the next upgrade (if I ever dare perform another upgrade). I also like the new template; the older one was was started to look a little too sepia to me.

Even beyond the crazy-making problems with the upgrade, the new version of iWeb still isn’t as stable or as powerful as it could be. For example, that column to the right still had to be manually copied for each page. That weakness also means that I can’t really update that right-side column without having to manually update each subsidiary page (a real pain). In using iWeb, I also couldn’t keep the names of most of my subsidiary pages from my previous site design (the one constructed in Drupal), because iWeb doesn’t given you page-naming power the same way Drupal does. This means other folks’ links to my subsidiary pages have been lost in the transition from Drupal to iWeb.

Recently, iWeb spontaneously decided one morning to change all my fonts, because it suddenly “couldn’t find” the ones I had been using. This in spite of the fact that when I looked at the fonts, they were there. This messed up every page I had. The guys at the Genuis Bar in Chicago fixed this for me, after 4.5 hours (no kidding) on the phone with AppleCare to no avail. (The phone people suggested I manually go in and fix every page. I don’t think so!) Then it happened again. Back to the Chicago store. The AppleCare phone people ended up asking me to find out how the Chicago guys fixed it so they could alert the iWeb engineers about to how to fix this problem. The phone guy from Apple also suggested I might want to try Dreamweaver instead. I am not making this up. Is iWeb really stable enough to be on the market? I often wonder. Part of the problem is that iWeb basically makes one giant folder out of your site, so that if something gets messed up, it messes up every page. Gulp.

In terms of design limitations, iWeb doesn’t allow for a search option, so my visitors have to use an advanced Google search for that. (Ask Google to search only at the domain http://www.alicedreger.com.)  And Lisa found that we needed to use a program called iWeb Enhancer to get the “contact me” page to work the way I want--but that failed during the “upgrade” to the new iLife--and for both the previous and this version, Lisa has had to write some Linux code to get my hyperlinked words not to simply turn grey after you click on them. (Why, oh why, would iWeb include a template that turns previously-viewed links essentially the same color as background text? How confusing!)

This means when I want to upload changes of my site to my server host, I first have to save the changes in iWeb, publish to a folder, run iWeb Enhancer, run some Linux code on the appropriate directory, and then use Fetch to transfer the files. A bit much! But it works, thanks to Lisa.

iWeb would allow me to do some of what I now can’t easily do if I published to Dot-Mac. In fact, iWeb tries to force you in various ways to publish to Dot-Mac. I resent that because it’s a way to make you have to to keep paying money to Mac. Feels more like Amway or my cable company than Apple.

On the bright side, iWeb has allowed me to create what I think is a fairly nice site, because it is pretty easy to use if you’re a computer idiot like me. And I’ve rarely regretted switching to an Apple, even though I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember how to do some programming in DOS. (c:/*.* anyone?) But who would have thought a Mac would force me to learn some Linux? (And I confess, my partner almost convinced me to go back to a P.C. during the iWeb upgrade fiasco.)

I might try a different program if it didn’t mean having to recreate my whole site again. iWeb doesn’t create files that are importable to other programs. Hopefully Apple will spend some money on making it a lot more stable and I will stop having aversion to opening my site, ever in fear that it will give me some bizarre new error message.

The formal photos of me on this site are by Pam Sebrell of S&K Creative Images. (I hold the copyrights.)