iWeb is a WYSIWYG template-based website creation tool made by Apple Inc. and included with its Macintosh computers. It was released during the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, California on January 10, 2006 as part of the iLife '06 creativity suite. The latest version (2.0) was released as part of the iLife '08 suite on August 7, 2007. iWeb creates websites and blogs, and publishes them via Apple's MobileMe and other webhosting services.

Overview and features

iWeb is a website and blog creation tool. The end-user does not need to have any knowledge of web languages in order to effectively use the product.

The features of iWeb include:

• Apple-designed templates
• Easy website creation
• An iLife media browser
• Drag and drop support for media files
• Blogging in a limited sense
• Podcasting
• One-click MobileMe publishing (non-MobileMe users can publish sites to a folder, then upload with third-party FTP services.)

iWeb is currently in its second version, and has a limited feature set and some unresolved bugs. Some limitations include:

• Creates different CSS files for each page instead of one central file to save disk space
• Templates dictate the HTML with little control over the final output (eg. difficult to add Google Analytics tracking code).
• No password support on non MobileMe user webpages
• Limited number of templates; new templates difficult to make
• Limited features for non-MobileMe users

Some of the these features may be included in the future.

On August 7, 2007, iWeb 08 was released as part of iLife '08

• New features added to iWeb '08 include:
• More Apple-designed templates
• Options to use personal domain names for MobileMe users
• Ability to add widgets, including Google Maps and Google Ad-sense
• Album view with "Skimming"
• Web 2.0 Slideshow for MobileMe and non-MobileMe users

Criticism of iWeb

Without any doubt, iWeb is aimed to the very beginner in blogging and website design. The simplicity and ability to publish a website using iWeb is a snap and this is why it attracts so many users. Though, soon thereafter, users realize that iWeb is very limiting when it comes to expanding your site with little HTML or Javascript snippets. iWeb for example does not support the addition of hitcounters like Google Analytics, the simple enhancement of favicons or search-engine friendly content.

Extending iWeb

As the iWeb community is quite large, hacks and tricks have been found to still implement the missing features mentioned above (and more). Several developers have created applications which ease the process of getting those missing features:

• iTweak - An allround tool for implementing search fields, hitcounters, contact-forms, favicons, Haloscan commenting, password-protection for non-MobileMe sites and several other minor things.
• iMap - A sitemap creation tool which also supports the addition of Meta-Tags.
• iWebBuddy - A tool to manage several domain files for iWeb and the addition of Mint or Google Analytics hitcounters as well as the modification of RSS feeds.
• iWebSites - iWebSites can split, fuse and manage several domain files for your iWeb site.