Speed up iWeb

I have made a couple of websites with iWeb and I am caught in the Catch-22.
The nicer looking the website, the slower it loads.
I have found two applications, Web Crusher and Web Site Maestro, that promise to speed up iWeb-created websites.
Anybody recommend this? I would like to get faster loading, but still remain with the drop and drag of iWeb.
In short, any experience or advice with programs that promise to speed up web sites.

I haven't looked at Sandvox for a while. When I did try it out my main criticism was that it wasn't as intuitive as iWeb.
Its relatively expensive but I suppose that is offset by the fact that it produces a more SEO friendly site. Having said that I would rather do the SEO myself!
If you have a good grasp of html, javascript, php etc, Sandvox, in the Pro version, makes it easy to add this. The iWeb HTML Snippet can be used to add a lot of fairly fancy stuff but there are times when its limitations are a bit of a pain. I'm hoping that Apple will develop direct code injection in iWeb.
As it has been pointed out, you can make exotic looking sites with iWeb but I would have thought that RapidWeaver would have been a more desirable choice if you want a huge selection of templates to choose from - at a price of course!

Similar Messages

  • Photo Gallery Speed in iWeb Site

    Hi, I'm looking for some advice on quicker photo galleries.
    I've made my organization's website using iWeb... It seems to work fine, except a lot of the site is really slow to load, especially large photo galleries. I realize a lot of this has to do with the code, but is there another solution (have the photo's hosted by some other, faster service)?
    See for yourself: http://turtleconservancy.org/travel/brazil/
    Thanks for your help!
    Max

    Hi guys, thanks for taking a look. The site is made with iWeb. The gallery was made by drag n drop + linking to image files, then adding the shadow box code in Dreamweaver.
    When I said the site is slow to load, I am just looking to speed it up. It loads fine on every test machine i've used. I'm just looking to make it even faster! (Google Analytics is telling me it's slow...)
    -If I hosted the linked images on another server (amazon cloud) would this speed things up?
    -Is there another way to present a gallery of images with captions + shadow box (or similar, elegant) effect that would cut down the load time?
    Also, a bit off topic, anyone know of a good resource to read up on taking advantage of browser cache capabilities and how to make a section of the site (ie. navbar) an "include"?
    As you can clearly see, I am no pro... Haha! Any other streamlining/optimization tips are greatly appreciated!
    Again, the site I'm working with here is: http://turtleconservancy.org/
    Thank you for all help and advice!
    -Max

  • Tip: Speeding up iWeb

    Well, I've mostly switched to using Freeway Pro for web design, but I wanted to put this tip out in the iWeb community.
    I've been playing with speeding up my websites per the suggestions from the Google Page Speed Test. What I found was that iWeb are slow! www.3michigan.org had scored 7/100 (really, really bad).
    1. Optimize the images using ImageOptim (free!) before uploading them to your web space. This means that you first have to publish to a local folder first, optimize the images, and then upload to your server using an FTP app, like Cyberduck.
    To find all the images in the local folder, navigate to it in finder, and type "blah" into the finder search. Then, press the + button and select "Kind is Image - All. Now, highlight the "blah" that you typed in prevously and hit the delete key. All the images in the local publish folder will now appear.
    Type Command-A and drag them all to the ImageOptim window. Now, ImageOptim will optimize all the images and automatically save them back into the folder where they came from.
    Now all you have to do is upload it to your webserver!
    2. Leverage Browser Caching
    Open your text editor and paste this bit of code into it:
    ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
    <IfModule mod_expires.c>
    ExpiresActive On
    ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
    ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
    ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
    ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
    </IfModule>
    ## EXPIRES CACHING ##
    Save this file as "htaccess" on your computer. Then upload it to the public_html or www folder on your server. Now, rename it to ".htaccess" (Without the quotation marks). If you server hides system files, then the file should dissapear from view.
    Anyone else have any tips for speeding up an iWeb website?

    I don't really pay attention to stats because they can be manipulated so many ways and there are so many variables. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
    If a web page takes more than a few seconds to load you will lose cutomers. I had one person claim their site loaded in so many milliseconds! Of course, it didn't. There are so many variables beyond the actual size of the files -  such as the speed of the internet connection for a start.
    So many people creating websites seem to blissfully unaware of the fact that a large and growing number of their potential customers are using wireless networks and are up against data limits. They need to learn to cut all the non essential crap no matter what way you create web pages.
    Optimizers will obviously give the best improvements on badly coded sites.
    Apps like iWeb have to have lots of divs with positioning info to allow the user to be able to drag stuff around and drop it anywhere they want. Using a little thought and minimal css you can produce an equivalent page with a fraction of the code by using the position of items in the HTML.
    When coding a site I try to avoid any positioning info apart from some floats and media queries for responsive designs. iWeb has to add this info for every item. A lot of it is inline which is one cause of slow downloading sites. The browser has to load this info for every page instead of just reading a master stylesheet once.
    Apps like Freeway and Flux do a little better but its down to the user. The more you depend on drag and drop rather than code, the more code the app has to write to make up for the users inadequacies.
    I can code a website with Flux that is faster than most but, because I can, I don't need an app like Flux or Freeway anyway.
    Its unfortunate that there's nothing much around that will help users who are unwilling to learn code to create faster loading sites since this is becoming more important due to the rapid increase of mobile devices and less people using computers to surf.
    Unfortunately, you can't build a one size fits all website without getting your hands dirty with some code. You only have to look at the amount of code that the online mobile website builders produce to see that this is just a bad joke.
    HTML5 allows us to use leaner, meaner code and the advances in CSS are helping to make up for the extinction of flash and to cut down on javascript. Browsers are begining to catch up - even Internet Explorer. Its just the people who are being left behind!
    People expect movies and slideshows on websites nowadays because they don't like to read. Movies need to be loaded in different file sizes and formats for different devices with flash fallback for older browsers. I haven't seen any software that will do that without learning code.

  • Is there anything I can do to speed up iWeb download times?

    I was wondering if I could ask the forum a couple of questions. (I have had a look through previous posts but wasn't able to find the answers I need. Apologies if my questions have been answered before).
    I bought iWeb a few days ago and website building is virgin territory for me. Over the weekend I put together a site. This is albeit a skeleton site, but the final site will be pretty much the same, only with more picture and text content.
    The site is primarily about displaying photographs to picture editors (etc) so fastish download times are important for me . On my G5 (with reasonable broadband), and after emptying the cache, the site opens very slowly. (Page opening times range from 5 seconds to 10 seconds). This is unfortunately far too slow for my needs.
    I have tried to speed up the download times by a variety of means:
    (1) Reducing the file size to 30kb jpeg files in ImageReady using 'save for web'
    (2) Using the 'original size' facility in inspector.
    Nothing seems to be increasing the download times to acceptable speeds.
    Does anyone know what I can do, if anything?
    Please check out this skeleton site at:
    http://web.mac.com/gregoryclements/iWeb
    Any help or feedback with this would be very much appreciated.
    Cheers,
    Greg
    1.6GHz PowerPC G5   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

    Hi Greg,
    Went to your web site. Page loading time wasn't too bad here, but I'm a photographer also and am sympathetic to your need for speed.
    Here's what I found and my current ideas for speeding up page loading speed.
    I grabbed two of your images and found that they were 450k png files, not 30k as mentioned plus the images, in my opinion, are soft and could be sharper.
    Some iWeb observations re: Photo Pages and Image Optimization Workflow
    Dropping hirez files into iWeb it will automatically "Fit Image" to 800x800px with a jpeg compression of 10.
    Watching users open my web pages I've noticed and feel:
    a) Alot of these folks are PC users and their display resolutions are not set as high as we use editing photos.
    b). Because of this, images over 500px high cripples some users from seeing the bottom of a page and controls that may be there.
    c) My current workflow includes using "Fit Image" to Width 700px and Heigth 500px.
    Following are Custom and Batch Image Processing Workflows
    These will work with Raw, Tif or Jpg images and will assume that you have reasonably worked up your images applying your own voodoo.
    Custom Image Processing Workflow. (using smallest file, quick version)
    1. Load images into Bridge
    2. Edit and manually sort images into the order you want.
    3. Renumber images with (sequence)(-)(Filename)
    4. Use Tools->Photoshop->Image Processor
    Save the files as sRGB Tiff and Fit Image H500px by 700px
    5. Open images in Photoshop
    6. Apply your custom image image corrections to each image
    7. Sharpen the images
    8. Save for Web using jpeg with medium compression.
    9. Images are now ready for web use.
    Using this process a couple of times you will come away with a feel for the Custom image correction and amount of sharpening and compression works best for your images.
    Now you are ready to start batching images.
    First create a bunch of commonly used action.
    I have a "Sharpen" folder containing actions named:
    30 SmartSharp
    40 SmartSharp
    50 SmartSharp
    60 SmartSharp
    etc.
    Also, I have a Convert to Profile folder of actions
    A Color Correct folder of actions that calls on some of my favorite nik Color Efex filters and presets.
    And a "Save As" folder of actions containing
    Save4Web high
    Save4Web medium
    --Don't let me lose you here becase here comes the good part
    Create a folder of "Combined Actions" and create some useful combinations.
    Example: "sRGB 50Sharp WebMedium" that calls on three of the actions previously created Convert to Profile, SmartSharpen and Save As
    Now you are ready for:
    Batch Image Processing Workflow
    1. Load images into Bridge
    2. Edit and manually sort images into the order you want.
    3. Renumber images with (sequence)(-)(Filename)
    4. Use Tools->Photoshop->Image Processor
    Save the files as sRGB Tiff and Fit Image H500px by 700px
    but this time use: Apply Action "sRGB 50Sharp WebMedium"
    5. Images are now ready for web use.
    Respectfully submitted,
    Junebug Clark

  • Slow network timeouts, page loading when host is bad

    I just got a new iMac, and it takes a long time to timeout network connections to bad hosts. For example, on the Mac it's replacing I can just type "apple" into the Safari address bar, and since that's not a real address Safari would be smart enough enough to almost instantly replace it with "www.apple.com". The new iMac takes 30 seconds to do this. It causes a number of web sites to load slowly since quite a few seem to pull non-essential resources from other servers that aren't always up (ads, scripts, etc.).
    I can verify that it takes 30 seconds by running "time ping apple" in the Terminal, which takes almost exactly 30 seconds each time before saying "cannot resolve host". The old Mac fails instantly. Can someone else try this on Snow Leopard an let me know if it's fast or slow for you. I restarted in bootcamp/Windows 7 and I do not have this issue there: 'ping' times out right away.
    I don't think this is a DNS issue since the two macs have the same DNS server. Also, "nslookup apple" on the new Mac immediately says "can't find apple," like I'd expect.
    Any ideas on what causes this delay? Is this a configurable network setting somewhere? The new Mac is on Snow Leopard; the old is on plain Leopard. I'm not going through any proxy servers or running any ad blockers or the like.

    You can speed up iWeb by having each website on a separate Domain file and dividing up
    larger sites into sections in much the same way...
    http://www.iwebformusicians.com/iWeb/Site-Layout.html
    "I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link."

  • IWeb publishing to .Mac/iDisk- interruptions: does connection speed matter?

    Greetings,
    I posted an earlier message somewhere in the iWeb08 forum regarding my suddenly experiencing lack of completion of publishing iWeb site to .Mac. Publishing just stops - no error message comes up. I have however noticed that my internet connection has been also varying in speed - down to a few dozen kbps in the last day, which is when I started experiencing this problem. Does connection speed affect such publishing? in other words, if connection speed goes down tremendously, does publishing to .Mac sort os "times out"???
    Will appreciate input!
    - Roger T

    More than likely you are seeing a cached copy of your website. Sometimes this is a local phenomenon and a simple clearing of your browser cache does the trick (Safari>Empty Cache). However sometimes your ISP is the culprit with caching at their level. This seems to be a chronic problem with ISPs in the UK for some reason. And the only thing you can do is to wait it out.
    You can try adding a "?" to the end of your URL to force Safari to fetch a non-locally-cached copy of your site, but even this won't help if your ISP is overzealously caching material.
    Anyone in the UK can shed light on this ISP phenomenon???
    If you find this information useful, please don't forget to provide me with feedback by marking my reply as "solved" or "helpful" using those little buttons that you see in the title bar of this reply. I really appreciate it!

  • Iweb internet speed

    Hi there,
    How much traffic can iweb sites handle? If I've done everything correctly on my end, there shouldn't be any reason for my website to run slow should there? I mean I pay for server space. The demand should be limitless right? When I announced my site all of a sudden the first page is really really slow to open/load a podcast.
    Please help,
    FB

    FB:
    Where are you hosting the site? If it's MobileMe then you're going to have to learn to live with slow loading. MMe servers have a high overhead of software running to manage all of the social aspects of MMe. It's just the nature of the beast. If you want to have snappier loads and more reliability then use a commercial hosting service. Two that are well regarded are Host Excellence and GoDaddy.
    The demand should be limitless right?
    Demand for what? I have several sites on MMe and at times they are glacially slow. Since mine are family and help sites for the ADs I'm not too concerned about the speed. But for anyone who requires fast loading sites they should consider a commercial server.
    OT

  • Are other people's sites suffering from slow  .Mac (IWeb) download speeds?

    Here is the site:
    http://web.mac.com/laneos/iWeb/The%20Triad%20Institute/Triad%20Home.html
    Several people have remarked on the slow download speeds, especially the top links on pages other than the homepage.
    Please send reactions/advice on how this can be remedied. Thanks!

    I don't think .Mac is the problem. The problem is that Apple chose to use the PNG format for all graphics on your page, instead of the standard web graphic format: JPEG. This means that images, such as your rollover links in the top navigation (these are graphics, not text) are much, much larger than they need to be as far as file size. Anyone accessing your site on dialup or other narrowband connection is going to find your site takes a long, long time to load. Every graphic on your pages is being converted to PNG, which is an uncompressed format. There is NOTHING you can do about this at the moment, except Complain to Apple using this Feedback Form.
    Don't just complain on this forum, because Apple doesn't officially monitor or respond to user's posts here. But they do promised to read the feedback you provide on the aforementioned form.
    This issue of large files and slow download speeds caused me to totally abandon iWeb one week after I bought and started using it. My wife created a beautiful family site, but I pulled it down after testing on a dialup connection. It totally choked the browser--just on a simple home page. A friend waited 8 minutes for the home page to load, and then gave up. I'm just not prepared to anger my visitors to that extent.

  • Speed up how a iWeb page loads in a browser

    I just started using iWeb. I have coded in HTML for my personal website at work and that loads quickly, but when I load my iWeb page in either FF or Safari, it takes a long time loading each image. Is there a way to this up?
    TiA,
    DB

    DB ~ This article may help:
    http://www.iwebformusicians.com/SearchEngines/Optimize.html
    Also let me... Well, see for yourself by clicking HERE.

  • IWeb Download Speed

    I am having problems downloading my Blog form iWeb.
    It takes forever to publish even though I'm on a fast 8M connection, and it keeps giving me the following error upon completion:
    An error occurred while publishing file “/Web/Sites/iWeb/John's Blog/John's Blog/81703891-AE9E-4634-9C65-77D1437C31F6files/NZON_NZRT_2007_11_10_C16121655-3.JPG”.
    Some of the pages don't appear on the Blog.
    Any ideas?
    Thanks.
    John.

    Any ideas?
    Not sure why you posted here? Since this question has nothing to do with Apple's AirPort Extreme base station (AEBS) or wireless networking I would post the question in the iWeb discussion area.

  • Movie clips on iWeb--download speed for viewers...?

    Hi guys--
    Spent some time looking for a solution to this one and nothing jumps out at me...movie clips on my sites (30-45 sec) download onto the page REALLY SLOW...should I have 'compressed' the clips somehow before putting them onto my site, or is this just the nature of this animal?
    Thanks for your help, as always.

    QuickTime Pro can't extract audio from muxed formats (MPEG 1 and 2 or Flash) so you'll need other tools.
    MPEG Streamclip (free) can convert your .mpg files into QuickTime formats. I suggest export to DV Stream.
    These .dv files can be used in any DV editing software (like iMovie, Final Cut and even QuickTime Pro).
    Once in .dv format you can export to other QuickTime formats and reduce the frame rate and data rate and apply some compression to the file.
    MPEG-1 is a video playback format. DVD's normally use MPEG-2 and your file dimensions indicate that setting.
    If the file is indeed MPEG-1 the software I've mentioned above will come in very handy.
    If MPEG-2 you'll need the $20 Apple MPEG-2 playback Component.

  • Iweb 2.0.3 website generated not workinf at all for firefox or IE...

    I have made a very simple site dropping iphoto pictures, and saved it onto a file. When I call the index.html file from IE (whatever the version) or firefox, no pictures, no navigation, just some text comes. (just Safari on PC works fine). Using the java console, I can see lots of error messages that seem to make this site hangover. The messages are :
    Error: unterminated character class ^ in (my site...)/iWebSite.js (programmer hieroglyphing to me)
    the error is located at line 1044 : var urlParts=urlString.match(/^ at this sign.
    Same error within navbar.js, error at line 25: text=text.replace(/\ at this sign
    then I've got "detectBrowser is not defined" in iWebimages.js, "navbar not defined" in
    "voyages.html" my page)*, "setTransparentGifURL"** and "loadMozillaCSS in voyages.js, tinyMCE in messagepost (line 4046), and some errors about "$ not defined in WidgetCommon.js (line 16). Some functions are not found ? Where the **** are they ?
    (I am giving the lines, because I believe iWeb generates always the same kind of code, and line numbering).
    *: here : new NavBar('widget0', '../Scripts/Widgets/Navbar', '../Scripts/Widgets/SharedResources', '..', {"current-page-GUID": "469B94E9-EC59-4F23-AE9E-B157AE69E905", "path-to-root": "..\/", "isCollectionPage": "YES", "navbar-css": ".navbar {\n\tfont-family: Arial, sans-serif;\n\tfont-size: 1em;\n\tcolor: #A1A1A1;\n\tmargin: 9px 0px 6px 0px;\n\tline-height: 30px;\n}\n\n.navbar-bg {\n\ttext-align: center;\n}\n\n.navbar-bg ul {\n\tlist-style: none;\n\tmargin: 0px;\n\tpadding: 0px;\n}\n\n\nli {\n\tlist-style-type: none;\n\tdisplay: inline;\n\tpadding: 0px 10px 0px 10px;\n}\n\n\nli a {\n\ttext-decoration: none;\n\tcolor: #A1A1A1;\n}\n\nli a:visited {\n\ttext-decoration: none;\n\tcolor: #A1A1A1;\n}\n\n\nli a:hover\n{\n\ttext-decoration: none;\n \tcolor: #eee;\n}\n\n\nli.current-page a\n{\n\ttext-decoration: none;\n\t color: #fff;\n\tfont-weight: bold;\n\n}"}); (no idea of all what this means.)
    ** : here : setTransparentGifURL('../Media/transparent.gif');function hostedOnDM()
    I hace tried with less pictures (I am showing 1000), with no results, so it should not come from the amount of data, more onthe iWeb side.
    I have no clue on html code writing, and I am not doing weird things (just showing pictures and using iWeb because the slideshow is nice (Safari). I am a bit puzzled by those errors on a very simple site (does Apple deliver tested software - It was used to, but I already had lots of problems installing the last OSX version, and now the iLife part of it is also behaving like another software/OS provider. I would not like both companies to look laike (that's why I still choose Apple...)
    What should I do to make it work ? (please, if you have easy workarounds, not a tricky download of executables to be found in strange places !...) I just want to use iWeb in its simplest form, and I am surprised to be quite alone in this trouble (I have read that Internet Explorer was really bad at understanding iWeb pages, but in this case even Firefox collapses. Unfortunately the webbrowser standard is still IE or firefox (even if I like Safari, I have to comply with what is the most used in this (PC... ;-( ) world.)
    Thanks alot if anyone can help, (or should I find iWeb06 : some discussions forums say it is... better than 08... and then where ?) Sorry for being so long, but details may be important)

    Hi again (not been very active on the subject for some time).
    I have found another thread in here that seems linked to my problem: I ain't got any number, but
    you may find it looking at "IE crashing Iweb 08 blocking can be solved using Prototype 1.1.0" by balord.
    It tells me : the "faulty" part is located in Iwebsite.js. It is filled by something called Prototype1.0.0
    in iWeb 08, and apparently a solution could be to use a Prototype1.1.0, but up to now the description on how to fix it (changing lines within this .js) is not very clear to me. The link in there indicates a .js file, but it is far uncomprehensible, and I don't know which lines to remove, to change,...
    I also tried Maestro (mentioned in the thread, but this does nothing at all (nothing !) : it only wipes out comments from the html code, and reduces images size (good enough to speed up loading, but not to clean garbage html, or js. I have found some websites that apprently are exactly the same as mine, but working (one from a model called sam nelemans... ok there should be others, but this one is the plain use of iWeb as I intended to do ... with less nude pictures !) even with IE. I shall be trying to dump her .js file, but I have to know how to do this (maybe using the activity window within Safari, not sure).
    Another point : IE5 on Mac is also stuck. and if I removed the Iwebsite.js line in my html code, then even Safari is blocked as is IE. Probably it indicates that this is really the place where the bug (for me this is one) is located.
    I'll try to keep you aware of progress if any. No news from Apple side (bug posted). now news, bad news...

  • I've Made the Switch (from iWeb) &amp; Lived to Tell About It.

    I've gotten a lot of help and useful information from this forum over the years and I will certainly miss it. I've just completed a 2 month transition where I've migrated my site from iWeb/Mobile Me to a new site made in RapidWeaver and hosted by Host Excellence. I figured I'd write a little (or a lot) about my experience, to give some others an idea of what they've got to look forward too. Hopefully it will arm you with some things to do and look out for.  While I am describing RapidWeaver here, a lot of this process will be the same no matter what new software you use. I started off being pretty happy with what I had going in iWeb and not being thrilled at all about making the switch. Now I am so glad I made the switch and I am far happier about the new site than I was with the old one. BTW: the new sites address is: http://grillinsmokin.net . Feel free to visit. I think you'll quickly notice some things you simple can't do in iWeb. This isn't a knock against iWeb. I was very happy with iWeb and had no plans to switch. Where it hasn't been developed actively for four years now, it has been left behind somewhat.
    To begin at the beginning: I've had a site made with iWeb since January of 2006 called Grillin' & Smokin' that combined my love of outdoor cooking and photography. Over the years it had grown rather large, with 375 photo entry pages and 230 blog pages. The Domain file was around 1.4 GB. This was not something I ever wanted to have to recreate from scratch. However losing MobileMe as a host was taking away Value Added features like the Hit Counter, Slide Show, Blog Comments, Blog Search etc. The handwriting is on the wall for iWeb too. I might have gone on using iWeb, but between losing key features and the fact iWeb was starting to show it's age, it was time for me to move on. Just before the iCloud announcement this Spring, I began researching website building software. I looked at their features, working methodology, themes, plug-ins and extensions. I download trial versions of the software where it was available as well as some of the themes or plugins I might be using. I gotta tell you, at first I was very frustrated and upset, because I was not finding anything that had the ease of use of iWeb and looked like it was going to be able to recreate the appearance of my original site. It appeared to be a series of compromises. I'd like the features of one package but I hated the themes available for that software. Another looked promising but isn't being upgraded regularly. My biggest frustration was some of the iWeb page types just don't exist in other packages. For example the Album Pages where multiple Photo Pages can be grouped and displayed, don't have a direct equivalent in any other package I saw. As part of my discovery process I read reviews of the various packages, including head to head comparisons of some of them. I also visited their discussion forums. After doing this for 3 weeks I "settled" on RapidWeaver. It was under active development; had a thriving developer community turning out a wide variety of add ons, plug-ins and themes; had an active user community & had lots of help resources available.  The web pages it produced were standards compliant and you could get nice effects without resorting to Flash. I think the biggest selling point was all of the add-ons-kind of the same advantage the iPhone has with it's App Store.
    Once I bought RapidWeaver  & a 3rd Party theme, I tried the demo versions of some of the plug-ins and made sample versions of my page types from iWeb in RapidWeaver. I wanted to have a process in place, before I started mass production on the site. You really do need to do some of this homework in advance to avoid unpleasant surprises. The biggest minus I'd turned up about RapidWeaver (RW from this point on) is it didn't handle big sites well at all. The equivalent of the iWeb Domain file is the RapidWeaver Sandwich file or RWSW file. Once the RWSW file reaches 100MB or so you can get crashes or hangs uploading your site. Now 100 MB doesn't sound like much particularly when I was talking about a 1.4GB iWeb Domain File for my site, but RW doesn't include the photos in the RWSW file. Still I knew I was going to have to divide my site across several RWSW files. Initially the plan was to divide it into 3 sites: The main landing pages was one RWSW file and is the site reached by the url for the site. I was going to have a second RWSW file for my blogs and a third for my photos. Ultimately I ended up dividing the photos into 3 RWSW files. These extra files are hosted on sub-domians whose name goes in front of the main domain (http://sub-domain.main-domain.com). This meant some extra setup for me with my web-host, although they made the setup for the 4 sub-domains very easy and they were free. If you have a huge site and will need to split it, you'll want to check with your prospective web host if they charge extra for hosting additional sub-domains. For small iWebs sites this is not an issue-you have one RWSW file and one web address, just like you do now. My having sub-domains also meant more work linking files together across sites. RapidWeaver has something called an Offsite Page which helped with some of this, but having to split my sites up was the biggest PITA for me about the whole process. But knowing about this going in was better than finding out at the end when I tried to upload a single massive site. If you have a small site, the setup for uploading it is as straight forward as iWeb. RW has a built in FTP uploader or you can publish to file and use an FTP client like CyberDuck.
    Once I had my site organization in place and had experimented with best practices for recreating each iWeb page type in RW, it was time to begin. I've gotta tell you when I started out I was not a happy camper. I liked the iWeb way of doing things about 70 percent of the time vs 30 percent for RW. At the end of the first week I told myself I have to move on and give up on the past. I was no longer going to be using iWeb and the sooner I embraced the RW way of doing things, the better off I'd be. At this early point it was still hard to see down the road to the end results. No matter what new package you buy, you should try to go with the flow and learn a new way of working. You'll be happier and less frustrated in the end. In my case after having gone through the entire process now, I've ended up changing my opinion. Now that I've gone through the entire process, I like the RapidWeaver way of doing things about 95 percent of the time and 5% for iWeb. That 5 percent is mostly the large site issue I've described. As I began working I was able to reuse much of the text from my iWeb blog in RW. I did have to paste it in as unformatted and reformat it in RW. My pictures were well organized in Aperture which also helped speed the process. One of the things I did is automate some of the tedious repetitious tasks. I created Quickeys macros to do things for me when ever possible. For example I could go to a particular photo page in iWeb and select the first caption. I would then trigger a macro that asked how many captions are on this page. It would then select the caption in iWeb, copy it, switch to RW and paste it in place and repeat XX times. If you know Quickeys or Applescript (I am guessing) there are plenty of opportunities to put it to good use.
    RW present a different way of working than you are used to in iWeb and you'll just need to get used to it. What I am describing here would be true of any of the other packages I looked at too. First off it isn't WYSIWYG while you are editing. You are working with fairly basic looking text with few clues as to what the real page looks like. You switch to a preview mode to see what the page looks like in a browser. At first blush iWeb seems to win here. But what I soon realized is RW allows you to mix regular text and pictures together with html snippets right in the same text box. This makes adding counters or badges easy. Plus you can  use HTML formatting for things like Titles occurring through your page. Instead of increasing the font size, making the text bold and changing its color, you can simply say this is Heading style 2 or 5 and this happens automatically per the predefined style. Better yet if you change a style everything on that one page or the entire site (your choice) inherits that change. So by working in a non-WYSIWYG mode you gain some long term. advantages over how iWeb works. The same is true with positioning. In iWeb it is fast and easy to place things on a page right down to the pixel. RW just doesn't give you that type of precision and next to splitting my site, layout was my biggest frustration with RW. At least to start. But there is a good reason for this "lack of precision" that may not be apparent until you view the site in a browser. When iWeb came out, you really didn't zoom your browser. iWeb uses Absolute Positioning where it uses anchored boxes for everything, whereas RW uses Relative Positioning. Objects with anchored text or picture boxes like iWeb start having problems if you zoom in or out more than one step. Text starts over flowing other text  because the text boxes are anchored by one point. Pages just start looking scary if you try to zoom in or out too much. RW is looking at items relative positions and their relationships with one another. So initially you aren't placing the objects in the same way, it is more like eyeballing things in a way. But when viewed in a web browser you can zoom in or out to your heart's content. So what seems at first like a big disadvantage at first for RW, is actually a HUGE advantage.
    This is why you need to go with the flow and try to embrace the new way of working. I mentioned earlier that I wasn't able to find a page type that was equivalent to the iWeb album page. I was able to use a very flexible plug-in for RW called stacks, which allows you to create various single and multi-column or multi-row layouts using empty stacks. You then populate the empty stacks with content, pictures text etc. These pages were not like iWeb albums where you nest the Photo Album Pages in the Album page and they create a  skimmable preview and an automatic link to the album. Once I actually started making these new "Album" Pages in RW I realized I was gaining as much or more than I was loosing. The skimmable preview pictures was eyecandy I could live without. Nice touch, not essential.  I never liked the way the preview  picture shown on the Album page was the first photo in the Photo album. You couldn't change this. Now that I am placing my own photo on the Album page, I could use any picture and make it any size I wanted too. In iWeb the Album Caption was the name of the Photo Page. If this name was too long the caption didn't go to a second line, it got cut off. Any link in RW can have a description added to the link which is what you see in the yellow box when you hover your mouse over the item being linked. I used to hide text boxes links under the pictures on the Albums page for SEO and navigation help. So yes now I have to manually link the Album picture to the Photo Page, but I am no longer creating a hidden text box with a link that I have to remember to move when I add pages to the album. So once again my first impression was wrong. Advantage RW.
    Another advantage to RW is any page type can have a sidebar. You can easily add favicons and site logos. You can easily add metadata to any page and customized the names of the path to your pages. The Themes can be more powerful and customizable too. About one week into the process I was begining to really go with the flow and see this new way of working had far more advantages for me than disadvantages.
    By the time I finished my new RW site, my iWeb site was looking tired and dated. My biggest and most pleasant surprises were saved until the end. Any kind of SEO was a PITA with iWeb. You had to embed snippets on each page with a code from HaloScan or Google Analytics. Problem was, iWeb erased any such HTML code while you were uploading. So you then had to use a regular expression in the text box ("HaloScan goes here"), upload your site and replace the regular expression with the actual code using a 3rd party tool. Oh and don't do that on any blog page where you are using the built in Apple commenting system because the comments will disappear. I also had problems where the new comment badge would not show up for weeks or months after a comment was made. It was getting so the things I had to do AFTER I uploaded my site to MobileMe were taking longer than uploading the site. Once the site was recreated, it was time to add blog comments, a guestbook, a contact form, Google Analytics, and publish a site map. In my iWeb-influenced mind, I was saving the fussy PITA things for last.  I was dead wrong. Unlike what you go through with iWeb, it couldn't have been been easier in RW:
    -Blog Comments: Set up an account with the provider. Then I had to go into the page setup in RW for my blog page and click on a popup menu of comment providers & select Discus. If your provider isn't listed you paste some HTML code from the provider into a dialogue box provided by RW for the blog page. In my case it was simpler, just set Discus in the popup menu. Now instead of the iWeb badge showing me new posts (and only when it was in the mood), I now get an email.
    -Google Analytics: Set up an account with Google. Go to the Stats area in the RW side bar, click on Configure, paste in your code from Google and you are good to go. You can monitor your Google analytics stats right from within RapidWeaver. (Also works this way for GoSquared Live Stats).
    -Guestbook: Same as iWeb. You add a page with an HTML snippet from your Guestbook provider in an iFrame.
    -Contact Form: This is a RW page type which masks your email address from the spambots by transferring the information to an invisible and inaccessible  page within your site. This page then emails you the information.
    -Full Site Search: This doesn't exist in iWeb. You can search your blogs right now, but this is one of the features you lose when MobileMe shuts down. By adding an inexpensive Plug in called RapidSearch Pro I enable full site search. You set up a MySQL server for your site. Host Excellence walked me through the 4-Step Process via a well written Help File. You then control what pages are indexed via your sitemap.xml file. You let RapidSearch Pro index your site and you are good to go.
    -SiteMap: There is a simple SiteMap generation feature built into RW 5. There are third party tools for doing this for iWeb. I purchased an inexpensive RW plug in called SiteMap plus that not only generates the sitemap.xml file, it allows you to customize what pages get searched and at what frequency. This ties into what is searched via RapidSearch Pro.  This plug-in also generates a visible and customizable sitemap page to help your site's users find their way around. Another bonus of being hosted off Mobile Me is when I went to add my sites to my Google account they had already been indexed. It seemed like they never crawled MobileMe unless you told them you wanted them to look at your site.
    Link Checking: This doesn't exist in iWeb. I bought another inexpensive plug-in called Link Inspector for RW. It checks all of your internal and external links and generates a report showing the status of all links. This was just what the doctor ordered for my large site. I will run it periodically to make sure external links are still working and that I haven't broken any internal links.
    My site was pretty much wrapped up on Monday August 8th. I just had to add in Blog Comments, Google Analytics, the Guestbook, Full Site Search and the Site Map. I figured I would go public on Tuesday or Wednesday. To my great pleasure these 5 items took all of 2 hours to get set up and working. This was a nice touch after 2 months of hard work.
    So there you have it. This is the process I went through converting my site over to RapidWeaver. Your mileage may vary. I am not pushing RapidWeaver for everyone. You have to find what program is the right fit for you. You may find staying with iWeb on a new host is the right fit for you. You need to decide if you can live with the features you lose once you aren't hosted on Mobile Me.  For me there was great pain, but in the end there was a lot of gain too. I do like my new site and I feel it will serve me well for years to come. Good luck to all of you in whatever path you choose. Lastly thanks one last time to the helpful folks around here
    Jim
    http://grillinsmokin.net
    Message was edited by: Jim Mahoney

    Thanks Roddy. I agree with your take on some of the other software you mentioned, at least from the perspective of having dabbled with demo versions of some of the others. I will add that with Sandvox I felt a little nervous about it. Kind of almost like the software was a "hobby" effort a la the first gen Apple TV.
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    But everyone's mileage may vary. RapidWeaver or any other web design program isn't right for every iWeb user. It all depends on personal needs, abilities and budgets. I'm just glad I can get back to posting to the site and not recreating it.
    Jim

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