SimplyBlog
 
 
 
Summary: iWeb 1.1.1 is a useful starting point in creating very simple websites, with some nice layout tools and effective basics for blogs and podcasts.  It currently lacks a lot that keeps it from serving mildly complex needs or building larger sites.  The provided templates don’t do a great job at following best practices in web design, and since templates can’t be modified, fixing your site can be tedious.  Disappointing to any web professional: no HTML can be edited, simple metatags and ALT tags can’t be specified, stylesheets can’t be edited, and semantic tags, such as <h1>, aren’t used at all.  In addition to fixing the identified problems, my top wish list for iWeb: a Web Stats capability that lets you view your stats within iWeb, richer blog and podcast capabilities, a simple flat-file database facility, and a voting tool.
 
This blog is written using iWeb.  iWeb (1.1.1) is what you’d expect from one of Apple’s 1.0 releases -- it is suggestive of some really great potential, but is too simple to solve many problems and too rough around the edges to be completely satisfied (I’m mostly thinking of iPhoto and iMovie, that felt the same way in their first releases).
 
In this review I want to take the primary perspective of whether a product is designed effectively for people.  Is the product useful?  Is it usable?  Does it confuse or frustrate?  Is it fun?  iWeb in particular has two levels of users: the person who is making a website and the person who visits that website.
 
The good stuff in iWeb
iWeb is well-suited to the home user who wants to share a relatively small number of pages, doesn’t expect perfection, and likes flashy layouts.
 
Templates and appearance.  A variety of pre-designed templates provide interesting layouts without any design skills.  While changes can be made to the pages, the templates can’t be changed, so there’s no way to quickly make a consistent change across your website.
 
The nice layouts take advantage of stylesheets to place graphics arbitrarily on the web page, and there are handy drawing tools as well as drop zones for photos.  I love the convenience of the Media Browser for grabbing photos and throwing them onto a page (in fact, I’m getting frustrated I don’t have this Media Browser in MS Office).  The tools for moving, cropping, and rotating photos are easier than Word, and the palette for adjusting photo exposure and color levels is extremely convenient if not entirely intuitive for those of us not entirely expert in photo retouching.
 
Blogs and podcasts.  iWeb does a great job of making blogs, podcasts, and photocasting as simple as possible.  The blog tool lacks a variety of features available with common blogging sites, but the iWeb 1.1 update added blog search and reader comment features, making the blogging capabilities sufficient for minimum requirements.  Individual blog entries have their own web pages, and allow arbitrary graphics and layouts, much more flexibility than I’ve seen with any other tool, at least this easily.  When readers comment on the blogs (an optional feature), a number appears on the iWeb icon in the dock showing the number of new comments, just like an indicator of new mail messages -- I like this attention to detail!
 
The limitations of iWeb
As mentioned, there’s no way to alter the templates, and that means it can be very tedious if you need to make a change consistently across the site.
 
No HTML or text tags.  Experienced web developers get no real opportunity to take advantage of their skills and may quickly become frustrated with some of the omissions. There’s no way to enter arbitrary HTML code.  Basic code snippets would make it easier to incorporate output from other sites, such as last.fm (music titles), flickr (photos), or LibraryThing (books), or to incorporate measurement tools like Google Analytics.  Text fonts and styles can be set, but not using proper tagging, most notably missing the header tags, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>.  And there’s no way to modify the stylesheet, so typographic formats can’t be easily changed across the site.
 
Poor accessibility.  There’s no way to set ALT tags, a silly omission that would be trivial to fix.  There’s no excuse for not providing a way to be minimally accessible, meeting Section 508 guidelines, including skip links as well -- any site without audio or video could easily be accessible with minimal effort (audio and video would need text transcripts or closed captions).  
 
Metadata.  There is currently no way to set metatags on a page.  I’d like to set keywords and description metadata for each page (and for the site as a whole, thus saving time unless I overwrite the metatags for specific pages).  Not only are these fairly standardized, these metadata could also be read by an updated safari as default metadata when a page is bookmarked, thus improving Spotlight performance.
 
There is incomplete access to set podcast metadata, and no apparent way to input an episode description.  Much of the podcast metadata, such as the title and show description, is inferred from text fields on the template pages, but no indication is given about which fields will be used.  For example, I used a text field to link to related podcasts and it ended up being my description, which made no sense.  In one template they have a text area called “About this podcast”, which I used in the same way, and the result was that the title of my podcast became “About...”.
 
More problems with podcasts...  Their default image for podcasts in most templates is the rectangle you see at right, while album art is typically square, so the image had to be resized.  Ampersands are handled incorrectly, as you can see in the episode titles at right.  Of course, in the HTML they had to be “&amp;”, but in the podcast they should just be “&”.
 
Publishing.  The Publish button publishes all of your pages, but ideally it should only publish the selected site so you can have working, unfinished sites that don't get published as well as sites that are published on other servers.
 
No domain name support.  The biggest limitation of .Mac for most professional/s and small business users is going to be the inability to host under your own domain name.
 
Larger sites.  While iWeb scales well in adding many blog or podcast entries, it doesn’t work well for other types of large sites.  Every page has a link in the navigation at the top of each page, which quickly becomes cluttered and unwieldy.  It’s possible to mark pages so that they don’t appear in the navigation and then build links to them by hand, but that would be too time-consuming for a large site.  iWeb needs to be able to automate multi-level hierarchies and the corresponding navigation.
 
Some more rough edges
There’s no obvious way to do indented paragraphs (normally a blockquote).  Bulleted lists also fail to indent by default, a major nuisance.
 
Fix the templates!  Poor text contrast makes characters look fuzzy.  There’s really no excuse not to use black text on white in the templates whenever possible.  Small italics is used frequently and is obviously hard to read.  Template designs need to allow for more text above the fold.  I also have this complaint about most of Apple’s templates: provide more options that are appropriate for small business -- serious, conservative, professional designs.  Tons of small businesses, non-profits, and educational groups could benefit and honestly can’t afford more than the cost of iWeb and .Mac.
 
Double spaces use non-breaking spaces, so if you use a double-space at the end of a sentence, it can result in a very ugly non-breaking space at the beginning of a line.  Double spaces should appear as single spaces.
 
Several nice options are available for list bullets.  But the options should also include diamonds and standard shapes, like open circles and squares.
 
The rumors for 2.0
Think Secret gives a rundown of iWeb 2.0 rumors:  Integration with flickr, Google AdSense, and other external tools would be a welcome addition.  I also look forward to being able to edit themes and get third-party themes.
 
My wish list
Okay, now for some big new features I’d like to see.
 
Web stats.  Currently you can add a hit counter to any page (you can see one at the bottom of this page).  A minor nuisance is that I’ve noticed these hit counters sometimes reset for no obvious reason.  Still, I think it’s bad style to have visible counters regardless, and probably embarrassing for some.  At the very least, the counters should show current values while editing in iWeb, but in iWeb they all show up as zero.
 
Instead of relying on counters, I’d like a selection in the left-hand column (above your list of pages) for “Web Stats”.  When selected, it would display a report with tabs, and viewable by month, for: hits/visits/visitors by page, browser stats (screen size, etc.), visitor IP/domain breakdown, search terms used to get to site, entry & exit pages, search terms used on the site blog(s), and grand overview of month-by-month graph.  I’d like to see blog stats, including: number of blog readers (doesn't recount return visitors), blog subscribers, podcast subscribes/downloads/pings (checking for new shows).  I’d like to see iTunes ratings and reviews right in the summary, and the same stats for photocasts.
 
In addition to these overview reports, it would be nice to have a pane displaying the individual stats for a page whenever that page is selected.
 
Web stats would be a great strategic move for Apple, integrating the desktop software with the .Mac hosting service in a way almost no other tool could easily imitate.  Good stats are also something small business users will really appreciate.
 
More blog and podcast capability.  I think Apple’s made a good start with blogs and podcasts but can stand to do more.  Roughly in order of importance, these are features I’d like to see:
  1. •The ability to assign a posting to a topic/category and show a list of those categories, so you can link people to the category they'd be interested in.
  2. •The ability to post by sending an email to my .Mac account with a "secret word" - then I don't have to start up iWeb, or even have my computer, just to post.
  3. •A way to list Most Popular Posts, based on hits.
  4. •An option to edit blog posts in "draft" mode, so you can have a working draft that doesn't get posted until it’s finished and marked done.
  5. •Let me, the iWeb user, rate, color, and tag entries (and optionally display those metadata in the archive, where you can sort by rating/color).  Then let me put in a "feature" box that shows a list of blog entries by a dynamic criteria (sort & limit to some list length, based on rating, color, tag, text match, hits, incoming links...)
  6. •An optional Archived Posts list, that shows each month with the number of posts by month.
  7. •Ability for readers to assign tags and ratings to articles, and to see summary data based on this.  Then Apple could have a way to let people search through all .Mac blogs based on tags, ratings, and popularity.
 
Databases.  The current blog facility could be generalized to a nice database facility.  Users define the fields.  Each record automatically includes fields for standard metadata (rating, colored label, tags).  This would work well for a poetry or photo collection, or any hobby collection.  Optionally, web visitors could submit new database entries and even upload photos.
  1. •The main page may feature some entries or a summary (totals, averages, graph).
  2. •"Entries" lets individual records be edited (perhaps with custom layout per record.
  3. •An optional "archive" page lets users browse & sort the entire database.
  4. •An optional "report" page shows summary data/graphs.
 
A voting tool.  Let iWeb users drop in a survey box with a set of responses.  Visitors can then vote and see the ongoing results after voting.
 
A potpourri of iWeb ideas
These are a variety of minor or oddball enhancements I’d like to see.
 
Automatic broadcasting of data:
  1. •Support broadcasting a list from iTunes, regularly and automatically updated, of any playlist or most played albums, with automated album art and iTMS links.
  2. •Auto-update lists of photos from iPhoto.  Photocasting would seem to be doing this, but it requires manual updates instead of happening automatically whenever the photo album changes.  (Caveat: I haven’t actually used this feature.)  Provide multiple display options of iPhoto photos, with easily adjustable parameters on any page (number to show, photo size, filters, CoreImage transformations, etc.)
  3. •Similarly, show bookmark folders from Safari (of course, Safari should add dynamic bookmark folders, bookmark ratings, and tags).
 
Media browser:
  1. •Add text snippets to the Media browser.
  2. •Let people record a quick piece of audio, snap a photo with iSight, or snag a video with iSight in the media browser.
  3. •Add a More Info flag to the bottom of the Media Browser.  Clicking it expands to show the metadata of the selected item.
 
Miscellaneous:
  1. •Add Site Search, which would also automatically search the blogs.
  2. •Add Podcast Search that at least searches the podcast metadata, but ideally does voice recognition on podcasts and indexes them fully.
  3. •Have a way to paste in an automatically-generated site map, in several styles, such as a text outline of links, or a few different diagram styles (a radial tree, a vertical or horizontal tree, or a 2.5D perspective layout).  Most of the diagram styles are more about glitz than practical as a sitemap, but glitz fits the approach of iWeb.
  4. •Provide a form designer.  Simplified so you specify questions and types of response but can't control the layout.  Maybe even a survey designer, beyond a simple voting tool.  With the ability to show a confirmation page.  With an iWeb-viewable report of responses (and option to get form submissions emailed to you also).  If there are numerical answers, then a chance to see graphs and averages.  At the very least, a contact form that doesn't reveal my email address.
 
iWeb review
Tuesday, August 8, 2006