Rowan Cottage : Wish

Rowan

Cottage

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iWeb

Graphic made entirely within iWeb

using Preview Passthru technique

iWeb Wish List

A wish list for iWeb 2.0

And now for something completely different! Just a text article about suggested improvements for iWeb. I know we got an update to 1.1 a few months back, and we’re now unlikely to see the next version until January, but isn’t it nice just to let your mind wander a bit and think, now wouldn’t it be great if iWeb had this feature or that feature? Well I do anyway, so here’s my wish list.

Not all of these ideas are unique – I know that other iWeb users have made similar suggestions, but there are a few points here that are entirely the result of my own thoughts. I’ve tried to separate them into different categories for ease of reference, but really you can read it as just one long list.

I know people already work round some of these ideas to achieve what they want – I certainly do – but how about keeping everything in iWeb without the use of third party web or publishing extensions, and without incurring any further expense with more software and templates?

UPDATE I haven't got iWeb 2.0 yet, but when I do, I'll update this page to a wish list for iWeb 3.0!

CONTENT

Ability to cut and paste HTML into the <body> of the page in user-definable HTML shapes, thus solving the blog comments, banners, hit counters, third party slideshows, Flikr and YouTube integration issues all in one shot. See PayPal Buttons, Dropdown Menus, Autoplay Music, Experimental, Links, Media

Ability to cut and paste HTML into the <head> of the page, for javascript and css styling and metatags. See Favicons etc

Ability to control size of photo thumbnails (smaller and tidier would be nice), and have more than 2 or 3 wide, instead of having one really long page (I changed all my photo pages to third party slideshows for this reason)

And speaking of slideshows, different photo slideshow options (with transitions) to reduce reliance on third party options and proper graphical album support. See Graphics Tips

Addition of other Apple items as buttons, not just ‘Made on a Mac’, but perhaps also ‘Visit your local Apple Store’, ‘Get Quicktime’, ‘iTunes Music Store’, ‘Get a Mac’ (to view the videos) all with the correct links, to further spread the Apple Love

Make it easier to change order of blog entries without messing about with cut and pasting dates. Ability to import raw text data into successive blog entries.

Self generating sitemap page based on site organiser layout. See Sitemap

Support for forms (I realise true support requires server side technology), but the ability to generate them from text entry areas, radio buttons and drop down menus would be nice, with the user sorting out the submission code themselves

Ability to set autoplay and controller options for movies and audio. See Autoplay Music

Ability to have different types of navigation, e.g. horizontal and vertical navigation bars, dropdown menus, jumpmenus, submenus. Vastly more work I know, but then this would give designers the flexibility and visitors a much easier browsing experience, and it would also mean one iWeb site wouldn’t look like every other iWeb site

PUBLISHING AND OPTIMISATION

Publishing of only changed pages for non .mac users – the single most important improvement in my view. This was fixed for .mac users in version 1.1. iWeb seems to have been left deliberately crippled in this respect. See Selective Uploads

Ability to configure titles of pages correctly, instead of basic titles like ‘Home’ ‘About Us’ – allow published page name to be different from iWeb page name/navigation bar name. And allow title of page to be different from either iWeb pagename/navigation bar name or published page name (title of page is set between <title> and </title> in the HTML code)! See Favicons etc

This would not appear as confusing as it first seems:

iWeb page name/navigation bar name – About Us (design-friendly for your page)

published page name – About_Us.html or AboutUs.html (web-friendly for publishing and your hosting server)

title of published page in browser – Janet and John’s Site – About Us! (visitor- and search engine-friendly and also informative)

Add the basic functionality of selecting whether links open in a new blank browser page for either internal or external pages. See Target Blank

Proper site manager with truly independent sites and independent site publishing

Built-in favicon editor in the inspector, e.g., on a separate panel, a simple one will do with 256 colours and a grid. See Favicons etc

Allow FTP to non .mac site though not essential

Sensible blog entry names (but I realise UUID generated names have been used primarily for .mac space and search)

Related to names of pages – a block on letting you use disallowable characters in page names, e.g. ampersands (&), colons (:), commas (,) etc to avoid publishing errors

Relative font sizes, percentage based page layouts to enable dynamic resizing of pages, ability to specify alt attributes – better for accessibility and validation

Optimised code to reduce loading times – HTML page size, .js page size are relatively large (although I realise the latter is largely related to IE for PC fixes)

Better use of optimised images (improved with iWeb 1.1) to reduce loading times

Ability to apply effects to images then lock these effects permanently from further editing and so therefore publish the output image as a smaller size jpg rather than larger size png

Better published site organisation with identical navigation bar and other site images placed in the central Images folder to save server space and reduce loading times – i.e., take the template idea to its correct and logical conclusion and load common elements from a common place, rather than generate them repeatedly.

How many people continue to re-edit, re-mask or resize their images once they’ve done with the page? I know I hardly ever. Why not keep the edited image in the Domain file rather than the original large version? That way, we all save drive and backup drive space. My domain file is only 70Mb, but I would hate to work with a several hundred Mb Domain file like some of you have.

EASE OF USE

Ability to preview a page in browser of your choice immediately there and then to check how it looks without publishing the entire site – yes I know you can ‘hide layout’ but nothing beats seeing what the finished page looks like in different browsers

Ability to lock, unlock, group and ungroup page elements à la Appleworks

Provision of a customisable grid to enable aligning of objects, again much like Appleworks

Support for tables – not necessarily cut and paste tables with formatting from other program (that wouldn’t be the iWeb way!), but to make it easy to generate a table within iWeb itself for aligning your own content with customised stroke width and backgrounds, rather than having to generate each item individually and align them

The site manager should allow you to nest pages to aid organisation of your pages instead of having them all in one long list (doesn’t necessarily have to incorporate nested links either – just the ability to physically organise pages – but clearly it’d be nice if they were nested links as well!)

Proper support for adding hyperlinks to animated gifs instead of having to use a workaround with a barely transparent overlay. See Graphics Tips

Ability to add anchors on a page to go to a specific place on a particular page. Click ‘Help’ on top right of page

Ability to add pop-up comments via the inspector to items that you haven’t got round to building yet – similar to the pop-up comments you get when mousing over built in items on an iWeb page like the image placeholder, default text box or the title box. This would be particularly useful if ever HTML snippets could be added within iWeb – a bit of free text will always help to differentiate similar looking HTML code

Ability to import pages from other domain files and likewise the ability to export pages either to archive, or to other domain files so you don't need to publish all pages all the time

.MAC

Contentious I know, but please, less differential between .mac only and non . mac features. I know, I know, with membership comes certain benefits, and so it should be the case. But…

…there are vastly more non .mac mac users than there are .mac mac users. We non .mac users may not want to be tied into the .mac experience for various reasons, but to cripple the program in certain ways is not good practice (publishing is the most gross example here) - consider Apple’s s stubborn refusal for some years to disallow iDVD to burn to third party DVD burners. It’s now happened!

Let’s not penalise the majority of us as we all do our bit to support Apple by being mac users.

HELP

More warning dialogs, e.g. iWeb knows about broken links – it changes them to the home page – a warning to let you know about them so you can fix it (or highlight them on the page)

Warning (with ability to turn off) about using a non-websafe font and that text may/will be turned into an image

Warning if your published page is going to exceed a user defined limit, e.g. 700K or 1Mb so that you can take action regarding images, backgrounds and effects

Instead of a completely blank site organiser, how about a default site on first launch of iWeb that the newbie could completely look into, disassemble, duplicate and generally explore how iWeb worked. This would improve the learning process and reduce the need for help. I know I was somewhat daunted when confronted with panels of templates and a blank canvas!

When ready, this default site could be deleted if wished. Or even better, have this default site stored somewhere in Application Support (it needn’t be a big site, just say 10-12 pages or so) and give ability for the newbie to add it to their existing Domain file and site manager as an extra site with one click!

CUSTOMISATION

Ability to alter hyperlink colours, surrounds and add rollovers to all inks including built in template ones and ability to save these changes to custom templates. See CSS in iWeb

Ability to change template midway through design – but this would be less important if you could change your link colours, default font sizes and alignment (i.e., horizontal or vertical) of the navigation bar yourself

Different navigation bar options – sizes and alignment as mentioned, but also image links, rollovers, colours. More difficult to implement but would be nice - dropdown menus and other forms of navigation (see above in Content). See Blog entry

Further, ability to use these custom templates as a ‘master page’ (like a true template) so that you don’t have to cut and paste or duplicate content every time – it’s already there! (Prime example is the blog entry page – always defaulting the standard template appearance)

SO WHAT?

Now, after saying all this, you may get the impression that I think iWeb is not good at all. Don’t get me wrong – I think that it is a fantastic program. I love iWeb – I use it nearly every single day, tweaking this and that, putting in new content. It isn’t a chore to do, no harder than writing a letter.

It has allowed a whole multitude of users, both web savvy or not, to develop or enhance their own personal spaces on the web as never before. I myself had a 15 month old holding page on my webspace before iWeb came along! The spectacular ease of use is unrivalled

For a first version of the program, it is excellent. Consider that with the rest of the iLife Suite, we are on version 6! Just think back a few years and try and remember what older versions of iPhoto, iDVD and iMovie were like, before smart albums, before HD movie editing, before excellent animated themes, before photobooks, calendars, before video and podcast capability.

As iWeb evolves, I am sure things will get better and better. As Apple Macintosh users, we know about quality and being the best, but we don’t wait for others to catch up, we always continue to strive for improvement, and to keep that ‘edge’. So you can perhaps say that the list above is just some sort of starting point. As Buzz says, “To Infinity and Beyond!”

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Any more ideas? Send me some feedback – click on the comments link below.

To send your own feedback to Apple about iWeb, click here.