About.com Rating
The Bottom Line
iWeb '08 makes it about as easy as it gets to create and publish a personal web site, as long as you publish your site to a .Mac account (note: Apple is no longer supporting .mac accounts). If you host your web site anywhere else, you'll have to work a little bit harder to publish it, although not all that hard.
Pros
- Effortlessly creates beautiful web sites
- Easily incorporates Google Maps and Google AdSense
- Web Gallery is easy to publish using iPhoto and iMovie
- Slide shows can contain up to 500 photos
- Built-in collection of themes to get you started
Cons
- Limited HTML editing capabilities
- Can't automatically publish to sites hosted anywhere but on .Mac
- Difficult to add third-party themes
- Blogging support is very basic
- Uses a silly web forwarding scheme for personal domains
Description
- Web widgets let you add live content from stock tickers, headline news sources, and other sources
- Web widgets support OS X 10.5's Live Preview feature
- Includes 26 ready-to-use themes
- You can refresh a site just by selecting a new theme
- Photo albums support up to 500 images each
- A 'My Album' page automatically creates navigation for any number of photo albums, podcasts, and videos
- Easy to incorporate Google Maps and Google AdSense into a web site
- WYSIWYG layout
- Drag-and-drop editing
- Automatic upload of content to .Mac-hosted web sites
Review - iWeb '08
Note: Apple no longer supports iWeb 08, though you can still use iWeb to publish to a non-Apple hosted web site.
iWeb ’08 may be one of the easiest web design tools to use, bar none. It features a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that makes creating a web page as easy as laying out a page in a basic desktop publishing program. Create some containers for content by drawing shapes, add content to the containers, and publish your web site. That's it; you're done.
The page layout aspect of iWeb '08 is easy to master, but that doesn't mean it's a simple program at heart. Behind the scenes, iWeb '08 uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XHTML to recreate each page layout in precise detail. Apple went to great lengths to ensure that live versions of web pages match their original versions.
Once you create containers on a page, you can fill them with content. I was pleased to discover that iWeb integrates well with the other major applications in iLife. You can drag-and-drop images from iPhoto, videos from iMovie, or podcasts from GarageBand.
In creating an eminently user friendly web design program, Apple omitted many capabilities that intermediate to advanced web designers look for, including the ability to directly edit the CSS and HTML tags that define a page and site. iWeb '08 is also missing a few basic capabilities, most notably the ability to manually add meta tags to pages. Some would say that the need for manually generated meta tags is a thing of the past. This may be true, because the major search engines seem to have no trouble finding sites created with iWeb. Nevertheless, hand-tuning meta tags can produce better search results, so I was disappointed that Apple chose to skip this option.
Even with its self-imposed limits on advanced features, iWeb '08 is capable of creating remarkably attractive personal web pages that most individuals would be proud to show off to friends and family.