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During this transition period, remember that switching design toolsis not urgent. You don t have to make a radical design changeright away. All you have to do at MobileMe s passing is save yourwebsite to a folder and move it to another web host. For now. However, even if you host your site without MobileMe, somedayyou ll have to leave iWeb behind. Now is the time if you have notalready done so to check out other options. There are many Macwebsite building tools for you to choose from, both as Mac softwareand as online services. Eventually, you will have to choose one. The tool you pick will answer the question of whether you re inlove with and married to your current site design...or whetheryou re willing to shake things up a bit. We suggest shaking thingsup because Websites should not, by their nature, be stagnant. Justlike all good publications, websites should be redesigned every sooften to leverage new technologies and to enhance visual andcontextual interest. Here are some steps you can take to get started with this task. Choose a new design tool Your new design tool will either be a native Mac application likeiWeb, or Web-based software. Most Mac-native apps offer benefitslike the familiar look and feel of OS X, local Time Machinebackups, and the ability to edit sites offline. However, you llhave to pay for both the app itself and for site hosting, much likeyou did with MobileMe, and you will be able to apply at least someof the money you had paid for MobileMe to a new Web host. Web-based site builders are typically free, and they let youconstruct and edit sites with the service s Flash-based designtools in any modern browser. This means you can t edit your pageson an iOS device, but you can view them full-size, or in anoptional view that automatically reformats your content for mobiledevices, on your iPhone and iPad. However, most Web-based servicescan t compare to native apps for flexible WYSIWYG editing andiLife media integration. The most important step in finding an iWeb replacement is assessingyour old site s purpose and appearance. Do your pages containtext-heavy blog posts, or are they mostly photo and videogalleries? Are the designs from stock Apple templates, or have youtweaked them until they re hardly recognizable? The answers toquestions like these will help you choose the right tool for yourneeds. Generally, the simpler the site, the easier it is torecreate in a different builder. Among native Mac applications, casual bloggers should considerRealmac s RapidWeaver ($80). Its clean, iLife-inspired interface puts a lot of power inan attractive package. The blogging tools in Karelia s Sandvox ($80) aren t as stylish, but its built-in widgets for Twitter,Skype, IM accounts, and more can turn your blog into a social mediahub. Free Web-based designers like Jimdo and Weebly also offer robust blogging tools. Although recently acquired byTwitter, Posterous is still available. Its free micro-site creation tools and iPhoneapp make blogging on the go almost as simple as updating yourFacebook status. For creating media galleries on your Mac, RapidWeaver and Sandvoxboast integration with iLife s media libraries, though Sandvox sdrag-and-drop gallery creation will be more familiar to iWeb users.Jimdo s Dropbox integration lets you turn a folder full of imagesin the cloud into a photo gallery, but to add videos to your siteyou ll have to first upload them to services like YouTube, thenadd them to your Jimdo pages as HTML widgets. Designers looking to break away from iWeb s themes and templateswill appreciate Tumult s Hype ($50). It s a user-friendly tool for creating code-freeinteractive HTML 5 animations, and it s powerful enough to buildentire Websites from scratch. If customizing templates is a bettercreative fit for you, Weebly s simple, intuitive interface makesit a snap to quickly change your site s look and features. Free trials of each of these tools are available as limiteddownloads from their developers Websites, or, in the case ofWeb-based services, as free sign-ups. Try them out to see which oneworks best for you before taking the plunge. Go native: Mac apps like RapidWeaver deliver familiar features. Pick a new Web host Visitors can t find your site online until it s uploaded to a Webhost, a service that makes websites available to the Internet fromnetworked servers. If you've used MobileMe to host your iWeb siteuntil now, then in addition to choosing a new design tool, you llalso need to find a new hosting plan with another company. Mostplans cost under $100 a year, but the exact figure depends on howmuch storage and monthly bandwidth is included. If you choose a native Mac app to design your new site, considerusing a hosting service suggested by the application s developer.That way the people behind your software and hosting service willbe familiar with each other s products, which can make uploadingyour site and resolving tech support issues easier. For example, Karelia Software recommends A2 Hosting for Sandvox sites. A2 s basic plan offers unlimited storage andbandwidth starting at $3.32 a month. Realmac Software recommends Little Oak for hosting RapidWeaver sites. Little Oak annual plans start at$80 for 5GB of storage and bandwidth of up to 50GB per month. Web-based design tools include hosting as part of their freeservices, but there are still pricing tiers and features toconsider. Weebly s free plan offers unlimited storage andbandwidth, but uploads, such as photos, are limited to 5MB. The Proplan starts at $27 for six months and increases that limit to100MB. Jimdo s free plan includes 500MB of storage and unlimitedbandwidth. Annual paid plans beginning at $60 offer increasedstorage that starts at 5GB. Host different: Using recommended hosts can ease the transitionfrom iWeb. And if you want to hang on to MobileMe for the time being, MacAcejust came out with MacMate , in beta as of this writing, as an alternative to MobileMe Webhosting. Replace MobileMe-specific features Moving from iWeb to a new design tool means more than just learningnew ways to create and customize websites. Some handy iWeb featuresyou may have relied on specifically site-wide password protection,blog and photo comments, blog searching, and the humblehit-counter required MobileMe hosting to work. Fortunately, mostof these features can be reproduced, even improved on, with similarfeatures and services from your new design tool and host. While password protection isn t currently available for Sandvox,Loghound s $10 Lockdown is a RapidWeaver plug-in that keepsspecific pages away from public eyes. It requires that your site shost use particular software on its servers, but a free trial letsyou try before you buy. Jimdo offers password protection with itsfree plan, and Weebly requires a paid account to password-protectyour site. Sandvox comes closest to implementing iWeb s blog and photocommenting system by letting you add Facebook, Disqus, orIntenseDebate comments to any page even to individual photos in animage gallery. RapidWeaver supports Disqus, JS-Kit, and Haloscancommenting, but only on blog pages. Weebly and Jimdo offer similarcommenting on their pages. None of these tools offers iWeb s blogsearch feature, though each can generate RSS feeds that visitorscan search with an RSS reader, such as the one built into Safari. Duplicating iWeb s old-fashioned hit counter is easiest withSandvox s Page Counter widget. None of the other design toolsoffers quite the same built-in same feature, though each can usethird-party HTML widgets that do the job. Each can also use GoogleAnalytics for much more detailed visitor tracking. Secure your site: Jimdo can password-protect your pages with a fewclicks. Transfer your iLife media No matter what kind of site you ve created with iWeb, it probablycontains photos, movies, and other media you ll want to transferto your new site. How you do that will depend on your new designtool. If the media files are still in their respective iLife libraries,using a tool with iLife integration will let you access themquickly, much as you did in iWeb. Without iLife integration,you ll have to first export these files to a Finder folder, thenupload them manually to your site. Alternatively, you can uploadiLife media to services like YouTube or Flickr, then add thosefiles to your webpages with an HTML widget. The Share option iniPhoto and iMovie s Menu Bar makes this easy. If you ve added media files to your iWeb site from other sources(dragged in from a Finder folder, for example), you may have sincemoved them from their original locations. They re still availablewithin your iWeb document, however, and you can quickly access themby publishing your site to a folder on your Mac. This has the addedbenefit of exporting your site s assets in an accessible form inthe event that iWeb no longer launches under future versions of OSX. Select your site in iWeb s sidebar, then choose Local Folder inthe Site Publishing Settings Publish To menu. Choose adestination and click the Publish Site button. In the resultingfolder, you ll find folders named for every photo gallery in yoursite (for example, MyGallery_files ). In each is a Media foldercontaining folders for that gallery s pictures. Thehighest-quality images in them will be named Web.jpg . Podcastand movie files can be found in your site s Media folder. See your site: Publishing to a folder can help preserve your iWebsite s assets. Recreate your iWeb site How easy it will be to reproduce your iWeb site ultimately dependson the site and which tool you use. That s a subjective decisionyou ll have to make for yourself, but some general rules willapply. The most important one is that you ll have to rebuild yourentire site. Unfortunately, there s no way to export a site from iWeb the wayyou might save a Pages document as a Word file, but if you vestuck to Apple s themes and templates, your job will be easier. For example, I chose to reproduce my site in Sandvox, which likemost site designers offers blog, gallery, and basic text pageslike those in iWeb. Using them was a relatively straightforwardprocess of matching page styles, then filling the new pages withmedia. Copying text from my old site and pasting it into the newone took a little more effort, but my new site was nearly completein less than two hours. Your milage will vary, but the work will beworth it. Not only will it teach you a new way of creating Websites, it willreconnect you with the great content you wanted to share in thefirst place. Out with the old: Rebuild your iWeb site with apps like Sandvox. No one is thrilled with having to change something they worked longand hard on, sometimes over a period of years, to get just right.Fortunately, if you have to re-think your website, there are manyconvenient and fun ways to do it. [ Adam Berenstain is a freelance writer in upstate New York and afrequent contributor to Macworld. ]. The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as Juice Filling Machine , Barrel Filling Machine Manufacturer, and more. For more , please visit Water Filling Machines today!
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