No, not me you fool - the software!  I have really struggled with iWeb and Mobileme over the past couple of days, and have learnt a lot about them - not a lot of it good.  For one thing, unless you do  some clever stuff, all of your web-sites are contained in one file...

 

And there are ways for that one file to get corrupted, resulting in the loss of all your sites, pages, etc.  And there is no way to recover a site or sites once the file is corrupted, so copious backups are required: in fact, I am only able to edit this blog because of my rigorous backup regime: the one file was restored from my external hard drive, to which it had been backed up last Friday.  Without that, I’d have been starting afresh, it having become corrupted during my investigations.

 

Mobileme isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either.  I won’t go into the gory details (which I’m not sure I understand anyway!), but basically, they changed something when they changed ‘.Mac’ into ‘Mobileme’ - something which means that iWeb is unable to update sites properly - particularly if they contain a blog.  Apple don’t seem to be able to fix this reliably - I’m using iWeb 06, and some people running iWeb 09 are still experiencing the same, or similar, problems.  So there’s no guarantee that upgrading to the latest version will help.

 

So the time has come to cut myself adrift from iWeb.  I’ve tried two new, supposedly similar, ‘template-based’ web creators: Rapidweaver and Sandvox.  

 

I don’t understand Rapidweaver - I don’t seem to be able to create pages without a lot of effort.  I guess it’s a ‘real’ web-page designer, and I’m not a web-designer.  It has themes, but adding content to them seems tricky to me.  Sandvox, on the other hand, is somewhat limited in what it can do - for instance it’s harder to ‘customise’ pages than it is in Rapidweaver, or even iWeb, but it suits the simple way I want to work - WYSIWYG, and with the ability to just drag and drop content into the templates.  Okay, not very ‘grown-up’ - but web-design isn’t my hobby, painting model soldiers is my hobby, and I don’t want to spend all my time writing web-pages.