I really wanted to like this program. It certainly has the Apple polish we’ve come to expect. The pages it turns out have a graphic sophistication beyond anything you would ever hope to see in a Windows web design program. It’s easy to use, or at least as easy to use as anything available. It even feels good. Apple almost, almost hit a home run. But instead — strike one.

You can drag whole iPhoto albums into pages to create photo galleries. You can drag and drop songs from iTunes or even movies. iWeb does all the messy HTML and even RSS code behind the scenes. iWeb automatically creates all your website links and comes with excellent style sheets. Text styling, you bet. Unfortunately, its failings negate all that it does so well.

Just like that long fly ball that drifts outside of the foul marker, iWeb just misses going yard. Nice try doesn’t count. iWeb has a couple of glaring problems that keep me from recommending it. The first is the biggest. It creates pages with huge file sizes. The home page of the “Travel” design weighs in a a whopping 460 KB. With web usability experts recommending page sizes in the 50-75 KB range, that’s ridiculous. And this is after Apple put out a revision. The page the original iWeb created was over 1.4 MB, which is so out of touch with reality, that it’s unbelievable.

I once read an interview with a Ford executive, in which he told of working in Dearborn at the Ford headquarters. He drove a company car, maintained by company mechanics and wondered what people were talking about when they said that Japanese cars were more reliable. Then he was transfered to the West Coast.

Living in San Francisco, he no longer had a perfectly maintained Ford. And, his car started having problems. Lot of problems. The moral of the story and one which Steve and Co. need to learn is that not everybody lives in the ideal world. Most of us don’t have the kind of high-speed internet connections enjoyed in Cupertino. As of the end of 05 barely over half of Americans had cable or DSL. Of those, most did not have the megabit connections that Silicon Valley has. The Steve Jobs reality distortion field hit the Apple campus and gave us a program unsuitable for the audience that could most take advantage of iWeb. Oops.

Another problem with iWeb, more of an annoyance than a show stopper, is the nagging splash screen that tries to peddle .Mac every time the program starts up. Put a damn check box on the screen that will let me banish it forever, or at least until the next update. The term for programs with such “features” is nag ware. And nag it does. It isn’t free if it annoys you every time you start it up. Annoyance has to have at least some monetary value.

iWeb does not let you store separate sites in separate projects. If you want to publish more than one site you have to crank up everything every time you edit. Since it is usually pro web designers who have to deal with multiple sites and this is absolutely not a pro level program, the inconvenience falls mostly into the “something you should know” category.

And don’t get me started on the “Standards Compliant” code that iWeb spits out. There is a huge gap between validating code and good code and iWeb is on the far, far side of good code. Its markup is redundant and non-symantic. It looks more like what Word would generate than what I think of as good. For more see What do I Know?

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With it’s terrific ease of use and the attractive web pages iWeb makes, I hope that Apple gets a clue and makes the program more focused on web page download speed. Maybe version 2.

For now I recommend that you get a blog with Blogger or TypePad, or look at Real Macs’ Rapid Weaver, or watch what Karelia Software is doing with their Sandvox Beta. Both offer excellent ease of use, interesting templates and much more reasonable web page size.

Bottom line: not ready for prime time.

Value for money: 3
Ease of Use: 4
Interface: 5
Output quality: 1
Overall value: 2

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 9:30 am and is filed under Casual User, Software Review, WYSIWYG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.