iWeb and self-serving blog posts
My partner Kirsten is a flute teacher, and has been thinking for a while she needs a web site. She wasn't exactly keen on editing the HTML manually, and has a Mac, so we started playing with Apple's iWeb. It worked out really well. It's quite limited - you get templates, and you can't even edit the templates, so each new page starts with the default header picture on it. But it does a really good job of looking like a WYSIWYG layout tool, hiding the horrors of HTML beneath the surface. The site requirements aren't complicated, but she was able to lay out the whole thing by herself, and she's very picky about things like layout and colours. She did notice that the published site has fonts and colors slightly off from what iWeb shows, even on a Mac in Safari. But it's pretty close. And she did things like overlapping pictures whose underlying HTML has got to be horrific.
Of course the real reason I'm blogging about this is that, even with the site having been up as a placeholder for a few days, our Google overlords don't seem to be aware of its existence. So perhaps putting an external link referring to the site will help with that.
Update: Just looked at the site from Windows, and I'm slightly less impressed with iWeb. The fonts come out a lot more jagged, and some of the spacing is wrong. But getting that all right is tricky to do. Bizarrely, Internet Explorer does a better job than Firefox.
