Trouble Creating an iWeb "Hub Page"

Question

Have been away from iWeb for a while, but now need some reminders on how to do a few things which I can't seem to find the commands for, but which I'm assuming should be relatively simple -- and that assumption is probably my first mistake!
The Project: Am needing to create a kind of iWeb "Hub-Page", which basically consists of a header, title graphic, etc. (that part's ready to go), and then four "poster-frame" images (let's say sized roughly 320x240), each of which is a link to either an Aperture-published Gallery (but one which is "invisible" to my other Galleries); an Aperture-published web page; or an iWeb-created Photo and/or Albums page.
In an ideal world, it would be great if each of these poster-image hyperlinks could be mouse-skimmed so the visitor could preview the contents before actually activating the link -- but I'm guessing that may still not yet be possible. What I definitely DON'T want is the automatic, never-ending "slideshow" effect I see when I try using the MobileMe Gallery widget.
So, my general questions are:
1) If using the MM Gallery widget, how do you simply disable that auto-cycling preview effect? (Surely there's an option for at least that much somewhere -- like the animation controls for a My Albums page.)
2) Also, how do you get the preview thumbs to fit within whatever image frame size you've set, rather than the ugly default whereby they get arbitrarily cropped when their aspect ratios and their horizontal/vertical alignments differ from that of the image frame?
3) And is there an equivalent way to link "dynamically" (i.e. with the mouse-scrubbing ability) from iWeb to an Aperture-published +web page+ (as opposed to a Gallery album), or even to a separate iWeb-published photo page (one which is either part of the same overall site, or a page from a separate site)?
4) OR... (if the answers to 1-3 are basically "it's 2010, and iWeb is still glued to coverage of the 2004 Summer Games in Athens"), should I just forget about widgets, and mouse-skimming, and simply drag in four representative images, make each a hyperlink to whichever MobileMe Gallery, Aperture Web Page, or other iWeb page I desire, and be done with it?
And if the answer to #4 is a firm "Yes", is there any way I can still have a uniform navigation bar across the top of each page, allowing for quick flipping between them? (...in other words, to have these various Galleries and individual photo pages -- each with their own unique URLs -- all appear within some kind of frame *when accessed via this new iWeb "hub page" I'm creating*... or will the visitor always have to click Back to the hub-page in order to then go to one of the other pages represented there?)
Hope that made some sense -- any guidance on any of the above will be much appreciated.
Thanks,
John B.
Toronto

Answer 1

Wyodor wrote:
So basically you're saying you do not like the default features of iWeb, MobileMe Gallery and all that, and you actually want a custom website. If that's the case, the short answer is: design it yourself. But it requires study, effort, finding solutions, practice, finding alternatives and more study. It's called webdesign. And for the most parts, you gave the answers yourself. So do what you want.
To be fair -- and perhaps my original intent wasn't clear -- I was really just trying to get clarification on a few of those iWeb, MobileMe Gallery, and related-app defaults, especially the current extent and limitations of their configurability. I stress "current", since any application default -- and whatever options exist to change its parameters -- is obviously a constantly changing and ever-evolving process. One version's "sorry, no way" scenario is often the next version's empowering new feature.
For instance...
1. Create the webpages you want to link to.
2. On the hub page add the four images.
3. Hyperlink the images to the pages you created in 1.
Which is indeed the Plan B scenario I outlined in item #4 of my original post, and which is essentially what I did in fact end up doing.
That original post was primarily an attempt to see if my Plan A scenario was an iWeb possibility yet (as I mentioned, having been largely away from the app since the previous version). I figure it's best to check these forums first before sending off more suggestions and feature requests to Apple Feedback, since it sometimes happens that the capability I'm seeking has in fact been implemented, and I'm just not looking in the right place.
And there's always a very grey area between configuring and customizing, especially in the area of web design -- iWeb itself being a good example. For all its easy-to-use, pre-defined templates (and thank goodness for them), iWeb does in fact also allow for a great deal of website customization in many areas. There are certainly a number of things of which it's now capable, which if proposed in the days of version 1 would have merited the response: "you're asking for a custom site -- learn how to code and design it yourself".
Much of what I'd like to be able to do is just that -- nice if available as an already-impemented feature, but not essential, and certainly not something I could justify spending large amounts of time learning how to achieve manually. Especially since this morning's non-configurable default is this afternoon's Feedback suggestion and next Tuesday's exciting new feature.
(Okay, maybe next month's.)
But as for any unrealistic expectations, my only true annoyance with any current default is when it seems arbitrarily limiting -- case in point being the automatic slideshow preview feature of the MM Gallery widget, which apparently comes with absolutely no "Off" switch. To me that just makes little if any sense, and runs counter to the general spirit of user-friendliness we've come to expect in our Apple apps, whether consumer or pro level. It's as if certain kinds of links (say to any external page) automatically included an engagingly cute musical intro, and there was no option to disable that default. It might be a fun feature, even a very cool one, but to make it mandatory, with no way to NOT have it enabled? I'd say that's a default that clearly needs to be changed (as in: made optional).
So would still love to hear from anyone who may have found a way to do this in iWeb '09 -- failing which, I'll definitely be adding that to my next batch of iWeb Feedback notes. Only question will be: whether to label it a Feature Request, or a Bug Report?
(BTW, for any humorously-challenged readers, that last question was meant as a joke.)
Thanks again though to Wyodor for taking the time to respond.
jb