As most of you know, I'm a Mac geek. It's not that I love computers...more out of a necessity you could say. I work in video hence the need for daily apps like Final Cut, Motion, After Effects, blah blah blah. But I'm not that geekish enough to sincerely want to know about web creation and have ABSOULUTELY NO INTEREST in it whatsoever.

However, when asked by a few web designers to conceive of a website for the company, I thought I might take a few days off and try to tackle it myself. Let's put it this way.....html and code is not me and I don't have the patience for it, nor will I ever. Whatever happened to the pen and paper?

BUT, my buddy just got the new iMac Intel when it first came out and iLife contained iWeb. Man, one cool app. I played around with it for several hours and it's drag and drop.

I do however see quite a few problems with it and was curious if there were any cats like me who had at least tried it out. I'm not too worried about the flaws of my own first template, as they will be tweaked later and put in flash and what not. But, has anybody tried to at least create something with it?

For web idiots like me, it almost seems like a blessing. Instant communication with family and friends, constant updates of where your life is going, aesthecially-pleasing pages, podcasts......I'd say pretty cool.

J

I messed with it some when I got my intel iMac. It is very easy, but has a particularly nasty habit of creating all kinds of funky markup in the code. Because the interface has to be simple, the stuff going on behind the scenes has to be complex. This makes it pretty useless to me for designing websites...give me Dreamweaver any day. WYSIWYG interface, simple site management via ftp, and the ability to crawl under the hood and edit the code directly; definitely the best web editing program I've found.

I got a copy of iLife in hopes to upgrade my school's website, but I will have to start from scratch. I was hoping to just be able to open up the existing site and do some editing. It seems that this isn't so easy with iWeb.

I'm still not familiar with it, but haven't had time to mess around with it yet. I hope it will be useful, but my first peek wasn't too encouraging. I was hoping it would be easier to use than Dreamweaver, and more up to date than Adobe PageMill (used to make the site originally).

I still need to find time to muck around with iWeb before I decide...

I have Dreamweaver and it's obviously the mac daddy of web apps. I just have no inclination to learn yet another app and all its tools when I know peeps who already have a handle on it. I spent a good portion of the other day on the iWeb forums......talk a about a snooze fest!.....but it did reveal to me why funky characters come up and what not and how to eliminate them. I never once had to type in codes.

My brother does seminars for Apple's Pro Logic here in Canada and he basically told me that Apple is shifting gears VERY quickly to make the computer and all its babbly gook a non-concern for artists. It's not what you know about the computer, but rather what you know about creativity. This has been their motto for a long time, but it's becoming more of a reality now. Although I find most of the iLife apps pretty rudimentary, they are fast and simple and one never gets held down in tech crap. In fact, I use iDVD all the time to do quick burns for clients.

IWeb to me is like an internet Word page. You slap down what you want, add some text, and voila you have a page that you publish. Upload it and you're in business.

I'll try it when I can spare the coins. I own dreamweaver,but whenever the code bits start showing up or the garbazh macromedia interface operates in a way I don't understant, my eyes glaze over.
when I started graphic design, it took me a while to understand the differences of photoshop and illustrator and to grasp why tools in one program did not do the same as the equivalent tool in the other [like the selectors]. I loathe to learn another non-intuitive interface. Blargh.