Steve Jobs Confirms Discontinuation of iWeb in iCloud Transition

re: iWeb alternatives

Honestly, I played around quite a bit with Sandvox and while I initially liked the program, I found a lot of limitations in it too. It's great if you just want to build a basic page and you like one of their default templates. But it starts coming up short real quickly if you need more advanced changes to what they provide.

Have you taken a good look at RapidWeaver? IMHO, it's just as easy to use as Sandvox for those basic, template-based sites -- but it can be FAR more powerful of a tool because it supports 3rd. party plug-ins. Some of the add-ons for it are inexpensive but very powerful. (EG. Need to create an e-commerce type site that uses a shopping cart? They make a RapidWeaver plug-in for that.)

Here are a few cool ones out there for it:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/31013/weaverbox
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24332/rapidblog
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/30145/rapidalbum
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/28607/googaloom


Snowy_River said:
One of the main things that I always look for as value in an application, though, is the prospect of continued support. Right now, I'm not yet impressed with what else is out there. (I tried using Sandvox to build a close copy of one of the sites that I use iWeb for right now, and became so frustrated so fast at what it wouldn't let me do, I trashed it immediately. While I haven't tried using it yet, watching the screen vids of Flux makes it look like an amazingly sluggish system - you have to always remember to manually update your navigation bar on each of your pages? Really?) So, I'm still looking for something that will coax me away from iWeb, but haven't found it yet. If need be, I may start looking at one of the higher-end packages...
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moving away from mobileme/apple to Yahoo

I have started to move away from apple and mobile and the iweb announcement just confirms it will be a total move. Apple seems to think it can be heavy handed and do whatever it wants with mobileme/icloud , soon you will find some new apple service that will do away with your email accounts.

I have been a user since .mac but have grown tired of apple giving me the finger. You can do everything (email,ical-iphone calendar,etc ) and more with a yahoo small business account, cost $9.95 a month with promo of first three months at $7.95.

features:
Site design tools
Photos, video, and audio
Domain name
Business email - 1,000 email addresses
24-7 support
Unlimited disk space
Unlimited data transfer
Unlimited email storage

here's the link:
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/features

Yahoo just does it , no flash or hype just good value for your dollar.

I will continue to move away from Apple as they have less to offer all the time and are getting more expensive. The arrogance they got them in trouble last time is back.
 
I recommend that people shop around. There are a lot of services out there, and prices and services vary. For example, InMotionHosting offers personal web hosting for only $3 a month. I use their business hosting and have, overall, nothing but good things to say about them.

Frankly, for personal web hosting, $10 a month seems awfully steep.
 
Great!
I wasn't expecting cradle to grave service.
And I heard this same kind of wiggy prior to the .Mac to MobileMe transition which, in my opinion, ended up being quiet painless.
Options abound. And many more will become apparent.
 
Scriptchyk said:
Can you tell me how you do that.. I've spent a lot of hours and don't really want to rebuild two of my websites?
Thanks
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You can publish your iWeb sites to an FTP server (i.e. you pay for website hosting at a place like LunarPages)and upload your files from iWeb there. You'll need a domain name and so on, but it's pretty simple to do. :)
 
Snowy_River said:
And, as for your referenced "infinite number of" alternative tools, I would strongly disagree with this. Looking at what iWeb is, there are very few alternative tools in its same category. iWeb is an offline, WYSIWYG website creation tool that functions very much like a page layout tool. In this category, I've found only two alternatives (a FAR cry from an "infinite number"), those being Flux and Sandvox.
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The one tool I use that is as close to WYSIWYG as I ever need is Sitegrinder. It is a plugin for PhotoShop so you need that, which is a barrier to most people, but since most designers start out in Photoshop designing the site anyway, with a few layer naming conventions you can output a fully CCS compliant site to whatever host you can normally reach.
 
ersatzplanet said:
The one tool I use that is as close to WYSIWYG as I ever need is Sitegrinder. It is a plugin for PhotoShop so you need that, which is a barrier to most people, but since most designers start out in Photoshop designing the site anyway, with a few layer naming conventions you can output a fully CCS compliant site to whatever host you can normally reach.
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Also there's CSSEdit - http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/ - haven't used it much but it looks very cool.
 
I have always thought iWeb is a superb application and began creating my web site when iWeb was first introduced. I have worked long and hard to create my extensive and easy to navigate web site and have just short of 20,000 hits (I am a photographic artist)...... I hate to see it not supported by Apple in the future. I recently sent Steve Jobs an email to this effect and received a short but gracious reply from him from his iPhone asking what creative ideas I may have regarding my ideas about iWeb. While I'm sure my answer won't make any difference in the future of iWeb, I'm glad my opinion was at least heard. Only wish Steve Jobs and Apple would reconsider and include iWeb as part of iLife in the future and somehow integrate with iCloud.
 
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wizzerandchips said:
I love iWeb, I'm not techy, so it works fine for me, it's clean and simple, and that's what I get from my clients, I've seen your website, very nice and easy to browse they say, and I've got a lot of work because of it. I'm in the building trade, i take videos as the job progresses, make a iMovie and drag it into iWeb, and publish, voila.

Sometimes you geeks want to much, busy complicated websites, no thanks.:p
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Amen! A lot of people on here seem to want to shout down iWeb as being rubbish because it doesn't do what THEY want it to do. However, there are many people for whom it serves perfectly. As with wizzerandchips, my website is really just to convey to potential clients what I can do for them in the real world - not to show them how flashy a website I can make.

To borrow someones car analogy - just because you choose the latest high tech car with all modern gadgets doesn't stop someone else getting to their destination in a trusty old car they've had for years!
 
Nothing like iWeb

I have used iWeb to build my personal & business websites. My business website is simple and I could possibly build it in something else like Freeway (I built a previous business website in Freeway Express) or Sandvox. But my personal website is more than 100 pages and I can't find any program that would let me do what I've done in iWeb, at least not with the zero HTML/coding knowledge I have.

iWeb is so easy -- I can put anything on the page anywhere I want, tilt pictures, do reflections, change the opacity, arrange text boxes and other objects easily, integrate with my photos, movies, and music seamlessly...from my experience in Freeway and what I've read about alternatives like Sandvox and Flux, you either can't do it in those programs, or it requires a steep learning curve. (Some people talk about RapidWeaver, which mystifies me...I have RW, and have never even been able to get it to do anything, not even the simplest things I've attempted.)

I have received a lot of compliments on how good my website looks. I couldn't make it look that good on any of the other programs. I like putting my photo albums on my website as opposed to Facebook or Flickr because they are presented with beauty on my site, while the others are just plain white backgrounds and a bunch of advertisements and other distractions that take away from the photograph.

Yes, I don't have to stop using iWeb now...it will even be able to stay on MobileMe for another year. But I'm faced with a dilemma. I had Claris HomePage for OS 9, and when I got OS X, I couldn't use it anymore, but there was no iWeb yet. If they're not updating iWeb, at some point it's just not going to work anymore. Or, it's like what happened to me with iBlog, a program I got from my .Mac membership. It is the best blogging program I have ever seen, and it still works, but the company seems to have disappeared--the website is still there, but support is no longer available. When something goes wrong, I can't get any help with it. I had just decided a few months ago to begin moving my blog entries from iBlog to the blog section of iWeb...and now this.

iWeb has been the Apple software that I have been most enthusiastic about. It is sad to see it go. It's also sad to see Web Gallery go--the presentation of pictures is far better than anything else I've seen.

If you want to see what I've done on iWeb, an example page is the page showing my Top 15 CDs of 2009: http://www.jleeharshbarger.me/Music_Central/2009_Music_Awards.html
 
Well, I'm not too surprised. I've been an Apple customer long enough to recognize their stealth mode discontinuations. But it really torques me off the way they simply drop all mention of a product from their support pages, and pretend that it never existed. An announcement and some legacy support would seem like common decency. It's not as if the extra server space would cost them any significant expense.

This is why it really gives me the willies to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on "iBooks" and "iTunes" libraries. You just know one day they're just going to arbitrarily turn them off.

Not that Apple is alone in this. I've got years of work in old Word and PowerPoint files that somewhere along the line stopped being readable.
 
But that's just called progress of technology ....

No denying it's frustrating, but after working with computers for something like 25 years now? I've just come to accept it as the way the stuff is, period. I remember in the 80's having a big library of software all stored on audio cassette tape. Then came the 5.25" floppy disks (and all the nice plastic cases to put them in). Then people moved to 3.5" disks and the 5.25" started fading away, so you had to move all that content over or find it inaccessible. Then they killed the disk drive itself, but hey - people were already getting serious about backing their stuff up onto those Travan backup tape cartridges or IOMega zip drives so no worries, right? Ooops... so much for both of those! The future was *now* recordable CD! Then came the push to move to DVD recordable instead since you can pack 4 CDs worth of content on just 1 DVD.... But now, looks like they're trying to phase the optical disc out too!

If you've got content you want to keep past the lifespan of the hardware it was stored on, or past the lifespan of the software app it works with? You've got to migrate, migrate, migrate.


tomatillo said:
Well, I'm not too surprised. I've been an Apple customer long enough to recognize their stealth mode discontinuations. But it really torques me off the way they simply drop all mention of a product from their support pages, and pretend that it never existed. An announcement and some legacy support would seem like common decency. It's not as if the extra server space would cost them any significant expense.

This is why it really gives me the willies to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on "iBooks" and "iTunes" libraries. You just know one day they're just going to arbitrarily turn them off.

Not that Apple is alone in this. I've got years of work in old Word and PowerPoint files that somewhere along the line stopped being readable.
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kingtj said:
No denying it's frustrating, but after working with computers for something like 25 years now? I've just come to accept it as the way the stuff is, period. I remember in the 80's having a big library of software all stored on audio cassette tape. Then came the 5.25" floppy disks (and all the nice plastic cases to put them in). Then people moved to 3.5" disks and the 5.25" started fading away, so you had to move all that content over or find it inaccessible. Then they killed the disk drive itself, but hey - people were already getting serious about backing their stuff up onto those Travan backup tape cartridges or IOMega zip drives so no worries, right? Ooops... so much for both of those! The future was *now* recordable CD! Then came the push to move to DVD recordable instead since you can pack 4 CDs worth of content on just 1 DVD.... But now, looks like they're trying to phase the optical disc out too!

If you've got content you want to keep past the lifespan of the hardware it was stored on, or past the lifespan of the software app it works with? You've got to migrate, migrate, migrate.
Click to expand...

Ironically, the data that have lived longest are those which I put in all sorts of harddisks.
 
Snowy_River said:
I recommend that people shop around. There are a lot of services out there, and prices and services vary. For example, InMotionHosting offers personal web hosting for only $3 a month. I use their business hosting and have, overall, nothing but good things to say about them.

Frankly, for personal web hosting, $10 a month seems awfully steep.
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I use InMotion Hosting too for my portfolio site and they are great. Its like 52 dollars every 6 months but you can get cheaper for longer commitments
 
Gosh I just saw this.

I've been stabbed in the heart! I have 4 clients sites running off iWeb.

Time to jumps ship!
 
pjhamill said:
You're all acting as though iWeb is now worthless. You can still use iWeb to push sites anywhere you want. You don't have to host with Apple. It's not that big of a deal, also I would love to see a percentage on how many Mobile Me customers actually host with Apple.
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but our current (apple) site is going away yes?

this is my site now: http://web.me.com/blond37/Site/Photos.html

it 'll go away ??

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Nixy said:
Sorry dude, it was legit', I posted the headers or weren't you paying attention
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given that stevie boy is no longer el capitan.. what if any effect does that have?
 
So . . .

Will I still be able to use iWeb indefinitely on an independent web hosting service after Apple abandons iWeb (if they abandon it?)
 
Wonder how many people using MM even use this feature besides me, however I am already looking for a new solution even hosting my website on my home server.
 
You can publish iWeb to an FTP / web hosting service provider

iWeb supports FTP-based web publishing. You can easily publish your website to DriveHQ.com using DriveHQ web hosting and FTP hosting service.
 
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