UPDATE: iWeb has been updated and improved since this was written.

This post is off topic in at least two ways: first of all, this blog is mostly about professional tools, and secondly this site is not about the author’s personal life. No rule without exceptions..

I recently became a father, and that was indeed a great experience! I mention it because it triggered me to start using Apple’s iWeb, and it also explains the low frequency of updates on this site recently. But why would I use iWeb when I already know WordPress so well? Read on and find out.

Easy does it
Our families live in different cities, so we needed a way to show off the new offspring. And it had to be a way that would be quick and easy to use – both for my girlfriend and myself. I considered using WordPress for a while, but choice landed on iWeb together with a .mac-account, mostly because of the great iPhoto integration.

The pros of iWeb
iWeb has virtually no learning curve. It sports a variety of design templates and supports quick and easy editing and one-click publishing (requires .mac). This makes it fun to use and helps keep focus on the content and presentation only.
iWeb allows you to change the layout completely for each post.

iWeb does not have an overwhelming range of features, and you do not get to make your own design templates. In fact, you do not get to use html at all. I contemplated whether I should consider this positive or negative, but I concluded that this is what makes the program so great and easy to use. I use a modified skin for this site that I am not totally happy with, but I still have not gotten the time to change it. You do not have to feel bad about these things with iWeb, because there is not much you can do about it.

You get some great Web 2.0 features in iWeb. RSS feeds are of course included, and Slideshows are automatically created on all photo pages.

iWeb takes away the need for external image editing and uploading. It lets you drag & drop images, scale, crop and adjust all within the application. It even ads nice web 2.0 reflections and drop shadows.

The cons of iWeb
The simplicity of iWeb is only possible because it is an application. This is also the cause of one of the programs greatest weaknesses. All your work has to be done off-line, and it is limited to a single computer. I have often missed the possibility of publishing and editing content on the run - with different computers or even cell phones - like I can with WordPress on this site.

One click publishing requires a .mac account. Dot mac is ok, but I find it rather slow and quite expensive.

iWeb is far less customizable than WordPress, and there are no plug-ins that I know of. It might be argued that this only strengthen its ease of use, but because of this, you miss out on the possibility of using ads, pinging blog-trackers like Technorati, Feedburner for RSS, and using trackback functionality. There are no statistics if you use .mac, so you also miss out on external statistics like google analytics.

Comments are supported in iWeb, but I believe they are only possible if you have a .mac account. A nice feature is that iWeb alerts you of new comments and displays them within the application. You are not allowed to edit the comments, and I do not find comment posting very user friendly, mostly because of the non-apple-ish caption texts (”comment as” vs. “your name”). It seems quite unneccessary that posting a comment requires image verification even when the whole site is password protected.

You are allowed to password protect the entire site. This is a great feature for family oriented sites, but it is really annoying that the RSS feed gets password protected at the same time.

While you may adjust your images, you have no way of setting how large you want the full size images to appear on your site. There is no way of tagging or searching for images in the photo archive.

One thing that is really sad is the terrible localization of the program. I have only tested Norwegian, but that really sucks! It creates a site with a mixture of Norwegian and English. But why am I even surprised? This is exactly how the sloppy and untalented people at Apple Norway treats the Norwegian Apple site – a sad exception to a company with an otherwise great customer presence.

Conclusion and recommendation
Using iWeb for family pictures and blogging has been very well received with friends and family. The ease of use inspires frequent updates and lets you focus on the content.

I highly recommend iWeb, but mostly for private and family use. The lack of a learning curve in iWeb is not necessarily a benefit for serious blogging – it might actually mean that you miss out on learning something useful about the internet, ad systems and the blogosphere. So if you see the value of the plug-ins mentioned above and intend to look professional, you should take a look at WordPress.

Please keep in mind that these are my experiences with iWeb version 1.1.2 after using it for a month or so, but it is in no way a complete review.

Update: This is a small tip to anyone who has bothered to read this far. I recently found out how to have text flow around images in iWeb. You probably know already, but since it was far from intuitive, but I will share it anyway. The trick is to cut or copy the image to the clipboard, place the cursor inside the text area where you want the image to appear and paste the image there. When you now select the image, the option to align the image and break the text will be enabled under text formatting.

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