This is the second part of a four-part series comparing four different methods I used for creating this web site. (You are viewing the results of the fourth method). Part I dealt with using a third party for the design and implementation. In Part I, I discussed two problems with using a third party. The first was cost upon which I did not elaborate because of my special situation. The second was the necessity always to coordinate with the third party for modifications and alterations, an inefficient approach. It is unrealistic to expect a third party to read your mind. Exchanging ideas, iterating options, and implementing changes was cumbersome. I felt the third party utilization did not suit my constant need to envision and alter, so I tried a second method, the use of iWeb.
iWeb is an Apple product intended to create web layouts using the WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get) approach. iWeb has you select from a few standard formats that carry promotional names like Doodle, Gazette, Highlighter, Elegant, and Watercolor, to name a few. I chose Elegant because I wanted it to look like a professional site.
It took me about four days to create a sophisticated, five-page site that included a blog. Had I gone for the simple approach, I could have published the site in 1-2 days. The iWeb interface is easy to learn, images are conveniently inserted and resized, and the finished product looks clean and neat. Unfortunately, it bordered on looking ‘cute.’ I retained the Cyberduck FTP client that I mentioned in the Part I blog and the HostGator web host. Once I had the iWeb-produced site up and running, I left it online for 3-4 weeks. I continued to make tweaks and modifications, as is the practice of all technologists. The more I viewed and used the site, the less I liked it.
There are numerous shortcomings in iweb, some of them fatal for a professional site:
1.) It was annoying that each page had an Apple logo with a crass “Made on a Mac” statement as the footer. This was trivial to delete, but an annoying annotation, especially when it sometimes went unnoticed until the site was published.
2.) iWeb is only partially WYSIWYG. If you try to modify the actual template, (like increasing the width or changing the divisions layout), by using its inherent drag-and-drop technique, you can produce unplanned changed in alignment and positioning. Another flaw is that the images and text sometimes move as directed and sometimes do not. The path to correcting a mistake is virtually hidden to the WYSIWYG developer: in other words, if you make adventurous or inadvertent changes, you are clueless as to how to correct them. (Obviously if you know HTML and CSS you could make those changes but that is the subject of Part III in this series. At this point I am critiquing the iWeb WYSIWYG concept).
3.) The page width is only about 600 pixels. This appears archaically narrow on most monitors. The blog does not move to the center when the window width is broadened; it continues to remain as a sentinel on the left.
4.) Strangers did not read my blog because there is no WYSIWYG-way to insert key words or descriptions to guide and influence the web crawlers bots.
5.) The site was highly sporadic in how long it took to load. Sometimes it would take as long as 15-20 seconds at 1 Mb/s transfer rates. And this was after I had ensured that no image was larger than 8kB. I assume the slowness arose from the computational overhead produced by iWeb’s generalized template approach, but I did not investigate. This long time to load was not only annoying but made the effectiveness of the site questionable.
6.) The more you viewed the site the less professional it looked. I cannot tell you exactly why this was so but it was like viewing a house designed by a builder as opposed to one designed by an architect. iWeb is functional but not overly so and certainly not professionally attractive.
7.) The ability to add interactive tools such as ordering my book (The Persuasive Wizard: How Technical Experts Sell Their Ideas to Non-Technical Decision Makers to be published this summer), submitting credit cards, getting feedback, and other information was obscure, if even attainable, and certainly not an integral part of Apple’s design or the WYSIWYG capabilities.
iWeb is best suited as a personal web site intended to be viewed mostly by friends and visitors who would call up the site by its unique URL and not by search or reference. If you want a web site whose primary function is to blog to no one, post pictures of your family, or make friends jealous of your vacation to Budhanilkantha, then iWeb is a perfect choice. If you want to have a professional look and feel, iWeb is not suitable.
After 2-3 weeks of the iWeb site I decided I could endure it no longer. Perhaps the only thing to do would be to design and write my own web site from scratch. Hmmm. That would require learning HTML and CSS. Perhaps it would be best to look before I leap and that is the subject of Part III of this series.