Easy way to make published iWeb site less of a mess?

April 28, 2007 7:16 AM

Is there an easy way to 'streamline' a site developed in iWeb?

I like iWeb because it's easy to use, has lots of lovely templates (well, my family likes them, and the sites are for them) and integrates with other stuff on my Mac like iPhoto. However, the published files and folders are a mess. Each page gets its own folder; elements that are common to each page are replicated (and so reloaded) in every folder; pages have stupid addresses (like www.yoursite.com/Welcome%20to%20my%20site.html); and images are often huge, despite iWeb converting everything to PNG.

Is there a tool I can point at the folders for an iWeb site that'll say, for example, "well, you don't need 10 identical copies of logo.png - I'll just change your HTML so it all points to a single copy of logo.png instead"? Or, "Hmm, logo.png doesn't really need to be 130kb; here, I'll compress it to 13kb for you"? If there's no such thing, any tips for making the manual process less painful? A 4-5mb site for ten pages with a handful of pics is a joke.

posted by obiwanwasabi to computers & internet (4 comments total)

The iLife apps are pretty much stuck in their ways. I had the most frustrating time trying to figure out how to make my own templates in iDVD, but apparently can't. The thing is, they're "supposed" to be "easy".

Anyway, probably the best thing to do if you're actually willing to dig into it, is "Publish" one page or so, and then copy the HTML into TextEdit and edit/change what you want to there. You don't even really need to "know" HTML, because you can just replace the text and photo URLs. This way, the repeatedly used files can stay in the same folder if you upload this HTML file and photos in the same folder. Etc.

(Hope this is somewhat useful...)
posted by deep_sea_diving_suit at 8:37 AM on April 28, 2007

You can make URLs less awkward by taking spaces out of filenames. Welcome%20to%20my%20site.html derives from a file named Welcome to my site. If the file was named WelcomeToMySite, it would be published as WelcomeToMySite.html

The problems with file instances and HTML are stickier, because it's dependent on whether iWeb will revert any source-level edits when you publish content changes (or whether it'll just plain break in the face of perceived-invalid markup). The whole point of iWeb is to generate pretty sites meant to be visited by friends and family, so the information aesthetics are not as important as if you were publishing something that could get slashdotted.
posted by ardgedee at 1:38 PM on April 28, 2007

You can make URLs less awkward by taking spaces out of filenames

I think the filenames are derived from the 'title' of the page, so removing spaces would make the actual page look bad. Why they didn't use underscores or something is beyond me... Apple sometimes takes shortcuts in places where most people won't see them.
posted by smackfu at 1:56 PM on April 28, 2007

Thanks. Next time I'll just make the one page, do everything else in TextEdit, then upload it as a single folder (with a real index.html to boot!).
posted by obiwanwasabi at 3:52 AM on April 29, 2007