I am having a problem publishing iWeb9 to Blue Host. Program publishes but wants to republish entire site each time rather than changes. Help?

Question

I use iWeb 9, for now, to publish a 1.45 GB website. I have moved to Blue Host and the site is publishing. But, after publishing and quitting iWeb, when I reopen the program it acts as if the entire site needs to be republished. (All pages are once again red.) While it recognizes the site exists, it tells me that it will republish the entire site, which considering the size is very problematical. It takes about seven hours. Blue Host's position, which is probably valid, is since it is publishing to the hosting site, they have no way to help. I really don't want to have to rebuild the site for scratch with new software at this point because that will be a time consuming job. So any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

When iWeb creates a "site" it produces a folder of all the required files and an external index.html file. These two are uploaded to the root folder on the server by the iWeb FTP.
If the "public_html" folder is the root folder, the directory/path field should be left blank otherwise, the next time you upload files, they will be uploaded to the "site" folder and not the root folder. This means that you will have two versions of your site - one inside the other.
The problem is that most support techs don't seem to understand the above since it is not the "normal" way to structure a website.
The other way to publish files is shown here...
http://www.iwebformusicians.com/iWeb/URLs-Favicons.html
This is more in line with the "normal" method of publishing sites but will break certain links such as in the case of the RSS feed - if any.
iWeb also produces an internal index.html file which is a replica of the external one. Unlike most other websites, this index.html file is NOT the one for the "Home" page but merely a redirect to it. This is what confuses tech support people!