Fixing The Bugs In Apple’s iWeb ‘08 Is Not Much Fun.

Don’t misunderstand. I like iWeb. I trust our family-oriented web site to iWeb and .Mac. iWeb is good enough that I decided to keep my near worthless .Mac account.

iWeb has some great features. There’s much to like about drag and drop and one-click publishing of a site. Until something goes wrong. Horribly wrong.

I’ve long wanted to do a family web site where other family members could contribute photos, movies, blog entries, and so on. iWeb ‘08 is barely a month old and it works as advertised.

Select a site theme, select pages from a theme list, drag photos, edit a blog, create iPhoto albums, add or change graphics, it’s the drag and drop web site that’s not a drag to build. Anyone with iLife ‘08 can do it. If you have a .Mac account, it’s ultra easy. Once click to publish online.

.Mac now allows your own domain name to point to your .Mac web site. That can be tricky to configure with your domain name registrar, but once done it just works.

Set up your site on iWeb and go crazy. Click to publish, or click to publish to a folder if you don’t have a .Mac account. Either way, it’s simple, easy enough that nearly average folks can do it.

Apple hides a lot of the XHTML, CSS, AJAX issues in iWeb. They’re so well hidden that you can’t reach them, so when something goes wrong, or doesn’t work as you expect, it can be frustrating.

Take the blogging theme. Please. Yes, they look great. That’s Apple’s strength, right? Look good, easy to use. Another strength is “cut and paste” which we’ve been doing on Macs for what, oh, I don’t know—freakin’ forever. Over 20 years.

Guess what? Cut and paste doesn’t always work as you’d expect in iWeb. I created a few blog pages, and dropped in some photos in the themes photo placeholder. That works great. Then I modified the logo and the page name and entered my blog articles.

As you would expect, everything worked fine for a few days. It’s drag and drop, right? Right. Mostly. Remember “cut and paste?” It got a bit tedious re-creating my enhancements to each page, so I started doing what was logical—cut and past from other pages.

It was easy. Click on a previous blog post, select duplicate from the menu, type in a new headline and enter a new date. What could be easier?

Cut and paste got me the logo in the right place, the copyright info at the bottom of the page, and so on. Did I mention that it was easy? Duplicate an existing blog, enter all the needed information, copy and paste the rest. It looked great. Except for one thing.

The blog’s URL, the web page address to link to the page, was wrong. In fact, all of them were wrong. If the blog page I copied from was titled “A Vacation Cruise,” then the page copied became “a_vacation_cruise_2” instead of whatever title I gave it. It happened in every blog I duplicated. The duplicated page came with a modified version of the original page name, and changing it in iWeb just didn’t work.

Well, that was pretty sucky. Fortunately, I had only a few weeks to “fix” so, one by one, I created a new blog page, and piece by piece copied the contents to the new page. That solved the URL naming problem. I’ll be more careful in the future.

Wait. There’s more. Remember that “cut and paste” problem? It didn’t go away. Each blog page in the theme I chose comes with a photo placeholder at the top of the page. I just copied those to the new page thinking they would show up in the Home Page as before. Uh oh. Bad thinking.

Somehow the photo placeholder is wedded to the page you create. Yes, you can create another one, or copy and paste one to a new page, but if you delete the original placeholder, the replacement photo doesn’t show up on the blog’s home page.

Guess what? Now I had another dozen pages to fix. Again. iWeb is drop dead easy, but there are some gotchas here and there.

Some elements just don’t work as you suspect and there is NO way to fix them.

I don’t have a problem with how Apple formats the URLs for each page or blog entry. In fact, for the blog, it’s not bad. Whatever title you create originally for a blog page, then save, is embedded in the URL string—like this for the entry Open Source Cola. The blog page is stored in the Entries folder with a year date, a month, and a day, then the title of the entry. /Entries/2007/9/3_Open_Source_Cola.html. That’s acceptable.

Overall, I’m pleased enough with iWeb’s ease-of-use and simple publishing to stick family photos and movies and albums and even a blog onto a .Mac account which was ready for the dump heap.

Proceed slowly and cautiously and double-check every link and change you make. iWeb is nice, but troubleshooting is not fun.

What’s been your experience to date with iWeb? Are you ready to show off your family web site? Share your experience in the Comment section below.