Thursday, February 12, 2009

Why iWeb is not a Good Web Design Program

I have some friends that have built their first web site with iWeb. Building a web site is not an easy task and there are a lot of companies that want to make it so by building WYSIWIG programs that seem to make the whole process easy. However, unless a person has some coding knowledge and web site creation experience, the layperson will get into some issues that will build a lot of frustration.

My friends are building www.redislandrestoration.com. I'm sure that the site will eventually work perfectly, but for now, it will need some major tweaking.

There is an inherent issue with iWeb in that the code that it produces will, most of the time, have cross browser issues since the program is used to produce web content and not web code. The code that iWeb produces, while it validates XHTML and has minor errors in the CSS validation test, it is not ideal by far. So what does that mean for "web designers"? It means that a lot of flexibility and learning is needed if you are not an experienced web designer. When you encounter a problem, you're going to need to hit the forums. iWeb has been around for a while, so there should be an answer to just about every problem that you have. At first it might seem like Chinese, but continue to tinker with your web site and reading the forums and the forums should provide you with a good answer to your problem. It's good to enter a web design project knowing that frustration is inevitable so that it doesn't overwhelm you when you can't do something.