Fun iWeb Projects Using Widgets
New improved iWeb makes creating web pages a blast with special features.
If you have a Mac and either a MobileMe account or an ftp site (possibly that came free from your internet provider), you can create really easy websites in the blink of an eye. Even if you’ve never considered having your own website, you’ll be amazed at how much fun you can have and how you’ll love sharing it with your friends.
If iWeb has never interested you in the past because you thought it would be too difficult, let me tell you that you can have a website built as quickly and easily as creating a Word document (or a Pages doc, for you Mac-centric folk). And if you’re a hard-core webmaster, then consider iWeb for quick and dirty sites that you don’t want to spend a lot of effort on. I have Dreamweaver too (an industry standard web creation workhorse) , and for a lot of stuff, iWeb gets me to where I want to be much faster – and it’s fun!
So there are a lot of reasons to create a website. It can be about you. It can be about your family history. It can be a place to share your latest vacation adventures with friends and relatives. It can be to advertise a business venture. You can make one for your school parent teacher association or – for the students out there – as a VERY cool way to complete an assignment like a science fair project or book report.
For the purposes of this tutorial, I’m going to walk through the creation of a website I made for my son’s Little League team.
The first step is to launch iWeb. Usually it’s sitting down in your dock. If not, call up the finder in the far left of your dock and then find your Applications folder in the left column and hit the “i” key to jump down alphabetically in the list of Applications. Double click on iWeb and the application will launch. You can also track iWeb down by using Sherlock or looking for it in the Applications folder of your hard drive. If it’s not in your dock now, drag the icon from the Applications folder down to your dock and drop it there, so it’s easier to get to. Don’t worry, the application still stays in your Application folder, too.
There are basically four areas of the iWeb interface. The most important is the big one right in the middle. This is where you build your web pages. How it looks is dependent on the Theme you choose when you create your page. More on that in a moment.
To the far left of the application window is a vertical light blue area where you can see the pages that are associated with your overall Site. Each Site that you create can have multiple pages – or only one. Until you begin to add more pages, you can ignore this area.
At the very bottom of the application window is a palette of tools that allow you to add elements to your webpage and adjust them.
To the right of the application window is your Media Browser or library of media that you can draw from to add images, movies and sounds to your website. The very fun new addition to this area is the tab called “Widgets.” At the top of the library pane are four tabs (buttons) labeled: Audio, Photos, Movies and Widgets.
Audio allows you to add music and podcasts from your iTunes folder or GarageBand. Photos allows you to drag images from your iPhoto library. The easiest way to get images into iWeb is to have these images pre-loaded in iPhoto. It will be even easier for you if all the images you want on your website are in a single album, but that’s not absolutely necessary. Finally Widgets are fun tools that you can drop onto your website to increase its functionality and professionalism.
Before we get too far into the making of the website, let’s look at the current Widgets. There are nine of them:
Mobileme Gallery: You can post a MobileMe Gallery to a webpage. This is a great idea for our Little League website because it allows all the parents on the team to upload and download their photos to the gallery so that everyone else can have access to them. Once the page with the MobileMe Gallery Widget is “published” anyone on the internet can scan through the pictures or click on the little arrow in the bottom right corner to launch the full-fledged MobileMe Gallery so they can upload and download pictures and see photos full screen.
YouTube: This widget allows you to embed a YouTube video in your website. There are actually much easier ways to do this using just iPhoto or iMovie to put the movie directly onto iWeb, but the advantage of using YouTube is that the video is “served” from YouTube’s webservers, not yours, so that cuts down on bandwidth being served from your MobileMe account. If lots of people are going to be watching the videos on your website, this is a good idea.
Google Maps: This is pretty self-explanatory. If you want a Google Map on your website, this Widget does it. Just drag the Widget to the page and location where you want it, resize it to the size you want and type in the address of the location you want to show people. There are options for whether people can zoom your map and other things.
Google AdSense: Want to make some money on your website? Add this Widget and Google will pay you for the visitors who see the ad. You must set up a Google AdSense account to receive payments.
iSight Photo and iSight Movie: Drag this Widget to a page to place a photo or movie from your iSight camera (built in to most Macs) on your website. Maybe if you want to shoot a quick introduction that people can view or a Welcome video, the easiest way would be with the iSight Camera. For me, I need much better lighting to look good, so I don’t use it!
Countdown: This is a very fun Widget. You can drag this onto a page to Countdown to a specific event. For our Little League website, we could have a countdown to the first team meeting, or to the first game of the season. Once you drag it onto your page, you enter the date and time of the event to which you want to count down.
RSS Feed: This allows you to feed an RSS stream from another website. Perhaps it would be fun to have Major League Baseball scores streamed to your Little League site, or if you can find an RSS feed about Little League coaching tips, then kids could visit your website for instruction between practices.
HTML Snippet: This Widget is similar to the RSS stream Widget. It allows you to link to some HTML code. One way to monetize your website is to become an Amazon Associate. With this program, you can link specific products available through Amazon to your website. When you pick a product, they create a “snippet” of HTML code that lets Amazon know that if anyone buys the product from your website, then YOU get paid a commission for the purchase. HTML code looks kind of scary, but adding it to your site is as easy as copying it from Amazon and pasting it in the HTML Snippet window on your page. What looked like indecipherable code, becomes an Amazon image and ordering information! For our Little League website, we can see if there are any baseball products available from Amazon and let people buy them from the website.
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i want to shoot a quick introduction that people can view or a Welcome video, the easiest way would be with the iSight Camera.
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Ok, I made an iWeb website, and I want to put it on the internet, but I don’t want to have to pay for it. its just for fun, not business or anything like that. I know you can go to websites where they will give you free blogging.
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Awesome stuff. Thank you for posting. Sometimes, this stuff can be a little overwhelming as I’m not terribly computer savvy. You’ve definitely made it a little easier for me.
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Fun iWeb Projects Using Widgets
New improved iWeb makes creating web pages a blast with special features.
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