IWeb & Setting up Personal Domain Name is Brutal

Question

I know I run the risk of getting this post taken down, but I have just spent six hours trying to have my iWeb pages sent to my domain page.
Nothing has been more difficult.
- There was no direction that I needed to get my domain name from another service.
- There was no direction suggestions where to get my domain name. (I finally for one from godaddy.com)
- The CNAME, adjustment, www etc. directions are AWFUL and absolutely no help.
There is so much more to complain about.
I am still hoping that someone can provide a point, by point directions as to how to point my domain name to my iWeb pages.
Nothing has been more difficult in my 25 years with Apple.

Answer 1

I think Apple did a great job, as far as it could. I used to work for a small training company in San Francisco. When I started our the first classes for HTML back in the '90's, we used text editing programs to place the graphics and all other layout. I wasn't very good at visualizing the text to how it would look, so I spent way too much time viewing pages and making corrections or tweaks. I don't type as well as I could, so typo's always killed me. With dial-up services being the norm - graphics optimization was/is key for pages to work well and required learning to use graphics tools like Photoshop 2
Some better text editing tools came out with buttons that worked similar to the Bold, Italic, Underline buttons, but they allowed us to insert the code for graphics, anchors, and links. Too Cool. Saved a lot of typing and typo's.
Then Adobe PageMill brought drag and drop to site design and I quit coding by hand. I understand the code and can fine tune it to what I want, but just grabbing the picture and placing in a table was really easy, and choosing fonts and font sizes from a menu was very nice. Then I upgraded to GoLive because I wanted to do full scale commercial sites, and use all of the other technologies that have sprung up. I would have stayed with GoLive for many more years, but right after I upgraded to GoLive 9, Adobe decided I needed to pay $200 more for a sidegrade to Dreamweaver or lose my investment and support. So I jumped at Dreamweaver with it's learning curve and tutorials, and I'm almost competent with it now after a year.
None of these programs explained how to get a domain name or set up DNS. Meanwhile, the hosting services have evolved, and they all have their own system.
I didn't use any previous version of iWeb because it was a pain to publish to anything but .mac or whatever Apple names it's server and the server has never had enough speed for me. It wasn't until iWeb '09 that I really began to take a look at it for some simple projects that could be put together in an evening, and turned over to a client for them to have fun with.
For what it does, iWeb is fantastic. I've created pages with layers and rich graphics that would have required much more work with any other program I've ever used. The learning curve for iWeb is as simple as opening a page and exploring all the buttons. Of course, you might need to understand why you would need a button, like the poster a couple of days ago, that didn't understand how to link to another page. But you catch on pretty fast.
iWeb will turn out results within a week or two, that would take you several years of study and graphics/site design to master. It has many limitations, so I wouldn't consider it for a commercial site, unless the site is a 'business card' site with show and tell, but not for retail sales, or a very large number of pages.
I'm hoping that iWeb will improve with future versions enough so that some tools for sidewide management like widgets that hold a navigation bar, that you design on your pages, and when you update the navigation bar in the widget, all the pages get updated automatically, or even the ability to change the address for a URL on one page and have it change on every page the link is on. Updates and corrections are not as easy to do with iWeb as other programs.
Still, for 5 or 10 page sites, iWeb templates take care of so many design choices that it is pretty easy to come up with something visually pleasing and informative.
All that being said, no design program has actually helped me understand a particular host's system. They are all different because they run on different versions of software like different versions of Apache or Windows server. Each company considers itself the master of security (by advertisement) and they use many different methods to control their servers and the services they offer.
Sometimes, the easiest way to get started is to go to a company like seanic.net and just sign up for their $3.92/month Linux based server. They even throw in the domain name with the deal. All of these hosting companies provide email services, ftp (some with password protection at no cost), and some provide more advanced services like SQL database, Perl scripting, and CGI-BIN. You don't need to use all of the features at once, and the tech support of a commercial company can get you going pretty quickly.
The tech support can show you where to upload your files, they set up DNS, and handle all of those other chores, so you can concentrate on designing interesting pages with iWeb.
Sorry for the blathering...
Message was edited by: dechamp because I can't spell or type sometimes