::: The EdTech Advantage :::

I played with iWeb a lot over the summer and I must say that it’s a great tool for classroom / personal use.
Creating a site is made very easy with the program and further facilitated by the very tight and smooth integration with iPhoto. The iWeb sites I created were mainly photo-based sites. Still, creating these sites was a very simple task. There’s just one major problem I have with iWeb and that’s the lack of being able to create individual separate files for each site you create. The way iWeb is set up now, separate sites you create are all part of one single file. Perhaps to maintain ease of use, Apple decided to lump all sites one would create into one file/database. The issue here is in updating, especially if you upload into a non Dot-Mac account. With 3 sites I was working with, for a small change in one of the sites, iWeb had to update all the files each time I published to my server (NOT Dot-Mac).

So, I looked around in Versiontracker and came across a program called iWebsites. Here’s a link to the author’s site. iWebsites made it much easier for me to manage sites created in iWeb. iWebsites works very much like iPhoto Buddy. If you wanted to create a separate library for iPhoto on, say, an external hard drive, you’d have to use (at least before the current version of iPhoto) a program such as iPhoto Buddy to manage multiple iPhoto libraries. With iWebsites, I can “create and manage” separate files containing only one iWeb site. This way whenever I had to update only one site, I didn’t have to publish all of my sites for that single update.

So, if you like iWeb, make sure you look into iWebsites. It’ll make your iWeb experience even easier! (Perhaps apple will “fix” this in the next major release of iWeb. In the meantime, I suggest using iWebsites if you’re working on multiple sites.)

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Filed under: Educational Technology, Mac