Archive for the 'iWeb Help' Category

EverWeb’s 10th Anniversary Celebrates Membership Sites, Dividers, Check Pages, Global Styling and More!

Thursday, November 9th, 2023
EverWeb Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary!

We can hardly believe it ourselves that EverWeb is 10 years old this week! It’s been an amazing journey, as some of you who have been with us from day one will know! So we would like to extend a very big Thank You! to the whole EverWeb community for all your support over the last 10 year! We couldn’t do this without you!

When EverWeb launched, it aimed at providing an alternative to Apple’s iWeb website building product which has been discontinued a couple of years earlier. But our goal was also to do more – to give website creators features that iWeb never had and that they always wanted. And the rest, as they say, is history!

So as we start our eleventh year, here’s a look back at what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months!

EverWeb Releases

A year ago this week, we introduced EverWeb 3.9 to the world and a year later, we are now at EverWeb 4.0.1. Here is a list of what we released in the year to end of October 2023…

EverWeb 3.9 – November 2022 – New Stripe Widget, New Dividers Feature

EverWeb 3.9.1 – December 2022 – EverWeb for Windows Launches! Maintenance and Stability Release

EverWeb 3.9.2 – December 2022 – Stability and Maintenance Release Plus Audio and Video Embedding in Blog Posts

EverWeb 3.9.5 – March 2023: Maintenance and Stability Release Plus Drag and Drop Images Into Widgets

EverWeb 3.9.6 – May 2023: Maintenance and Stability Release

EverWeb 4.0 – October 2023 – Membership Sites, Global Styles, Contact Form Addon Updates, Check Pages for SEO PowerUp

EverWeb 4.0.1 – October 2023: Maintentance and Stability Release for macOS and Windows

One of the great things about the maintenance releases over the last year is that we have been able to add in additional, user requested features as well as getting bug fixes out. One of the most useful features was adding the ability to easily add video or audio files in to a blog post in EverWeb 3.9.2.

Anniversary Highlight 1: EverWeb For Windows Launches!

One of the biggest events in the last year was the release of EverWeb for Windows to the world! Our thanks to everyone who took the time to test the pre-release version of EverWeb for Windows. The feedback we received was valuable and helped us hone the official release!

Officially, EverWeb for Windows launched with the release of EverWeb 4.0, but we did soft-launch the Windows product with EverWeb 3.9.1 just in case there were any teething problems. Fortunately, there were very few!

If you run in a mixed environment of Mac and Windows, you will be able to use EverWeb for Windows and EverWeb for Mac with ease. Both products have almost totally the same UI structure and Project Files are interchangeable. To find out more check out our post on Running EverWeb for Windows and Mac. For more information about running both EverWeb on Windows and Mac, please check out the EverWeb User Manual, or login to your EverWeb Client Area, then go to the Services-> My Services menu option. Select ‘Manage Product’ then choose ‘Upgrade/Downgrade Options’. Select the option from the dropdown list that suits your requirements.

Anniversary Highlight 2: Membership Sites Come To EverWeb

In addition to EverWeb for Windows being released, EverWeb 4.0 also launched with the much anticipated Membership Sites feature! Now any EverWeb user can create a membership site of their own within their website! Share free and paid for content with your signups as well as offering promotions and discounts.

A membership site is a great way to monetize your website as well as engaging with your customers and growing your business! And as you would expect, EverWeb makes it all easy to set up and manage!

Anniversary Highlight 3: Dividers for More Design Flair

One of the best new styling features that was added to EverWeb over the last year was the introduction of Dividers in EverWeb 3.9. Dividers can be used on most object types in EverWeb but are perhaps most useful in separating out content sections in Responsive websites. You have 16 different types of divider to choose from and each divider style is fully customizable to match the style of your site.

Anniversary Highlight 4: Global Styling and Paragraph Styling

One of the important goals for us when developing EverWeb is to make developing your website as easy and simple as possible. With this in mind, the new global styling introduced in EverWeb 4.0 lets you set up text styling throughout your whole site. By defining your own paragraph styles, you can easily create text defaults for titles, subheadings, body text and so on. If you want to change your style later on, your changes will update everywhere on your site that uses the style you updated.

EverWeb 4.0 also lets you choose the color palette swatches that you want for your site so you have instant control of both color and text styling at your fingertips!

Anniversary Highlights 5: EverWeb’s NEW Stripe Widget

Stripe has gained a lot of traction over the last few years as an alternative payment method to PayPal. EverWeb’s new Stripe Payment widget makes it very easy to integrate your Stipe account in to the pages of your website. If you don’t have a Stripe account, you can create one directly from within the widget. If you do have a Stripe account you can add new products to your Stripe account directly from within the widget.

EverWeb’s 10th year has been another busy one for us. We hope that you are enjoying all of the new products, features and services that we have delivered over the last twelve months. We have a lot more new and exciting features coming in the next year as you would expect, but what would you like to see in the future for EverWeb? Let us know in the Comments Section below.

EverWeb on Social Media

You can also find EverWeb on the following social media platforms:

Facebook

Flipboard

YouTube

Twitter / X

Instagram

32 Bit Apps Such as iWeb Not Supported in Apple’s Next Generation macOS!

Thursday, May 23rd, 2019

During the month of May, there is always press speculation about what the future holds for Apple’s major operating systems: iOS, watchOS, tvOS and, of course, macOS. This year is no exception, but one thing is sure… support for 32 bit applications in Apple’s macOS operating system will end with the release of Apple’s new 2019 software for desktop and laptop computers.

The end of 32 bit support has been flagged since June 2018. Last year’s Apple World Wide Developer Conference announced that with macOS Mojave (10.14) there would be warnings when launching 32 bit apps they should be converted to 64-Bit ASAP as they would not be supported in Apple’s 2019 macOS release.

One year later and we’re almost at the next WWDC and the next macOS will then be only a few months away.

If you are still using iWeb, this should give you pause for thought especially if you plan to buy a new Mac with a new OS on it in the near future! Now may be the time to switch from iWeb but will it be easy to do so? With EverWeb, we think it’s really easy! Here’s why…

Why Go From iWeb to EverWeb?

  • Both iWeb and EverWeb are drag and drop website builders for the Mac.
  • iWeb and EverWeb have similar User Interfaces making the learning curve a lot quicker when moving from one to the other. You’ll get up to speed in EverWeb in next to no time.
  • Both products support blogging. You can easily import your iWeb blog in to EverWeb with just a few mouse clicks.
  • You can host with your own provider or with EverWeb which gives you extra benefits built directly in to the product such as password protection, 404 page not found, 301 page redirects and regular product updates throughout the year
  • EverWeb fulfils the promise of iWeb with responsive web design, template pages, 100’s of free themes, in product SEO for better Search Page Results Rankings, animation effects, PayPal e-commerce built in, in product website project backups, fast, one-click publishing and much, much more.
  • EverWeb always keeps up to date with technology, so there is always something new to enjoy with every product update which usually happens every couple of months.
  • You will no longer have problems with iWeb crashing or other associated issues that hinder you working. EverWeb has been a 64 bit product for over a year and our regular product releases throughout the year always include stability and maintenance fixes.
  • EverWeb comes with 7×24 support 365 days a year if you have a valid user licence. There’s also the EverWeb community where you can ask questions, suggest features that you would like added to the product, try out the latest beta test versions of EverWeb and see what’s available from EverWeb’s third party providers.
  • Check out EverWeb’s blog (yes you’re here!) and also our YouTube channel that’s packed width videos about every aspect of EverWeb.
  • EverWeb is not a subscription service so you alway keep the product that you initially purchased if you do not want to renew after the first year. You keep the product and any website you have built.
  • And last but not least, EverWeb is now in its sixth year and we continue to grow and innovate! We’re committed to delivering the best we can offer to our community.

EverWeb Addon Products

EverWeb can be purchased as a standalone product if you have your own hosting provider, or with EverWeb+Hosting Lite and Hosting Pro options to suit all needs. There are also additional products that you can add to your purchase such as Site Shield Addon for HTTPS Secure websites.

Third party widgets and theme template add-ons are also available if you cannot find exactly what you need out of the box!

Making The Switch Even Easier

EverWeb Professional Services are also available so that if you do not want to recreate your iWeb website yourself in EverWeb, we can do it for you! If you want us to design a brand new website for you we can do that as well with a number of flexible options available.

You can find out more about EverWeb directly from the EverWeb website. Why not download EverWeb today? The download is the full product with the only restriction being that you cannot publish your website either locally or to the Internet unless you purchase the product.

If you have any questions relating to iWeb and EverWeb, please let us know in the Comments Section below.

EverWeb on Social Media

You can also find EverWeb on the following social media platforms:

Facebook

Flipboard

YouTube

Twitter handle @ragesw


Converting Your iWeb Website To EverWeb

Sunday, December 18th, 2016

Converting iWeb Websites to EverWeb

 

 

For many iWeb users, the introduction of blogging to EverWeb 2.0 makes it a perfect time to finally port legacy iWeb websites over to EverWeb. If you’re planning to convert your website, here are some things to consider before you begin that will help save you time and effort along the way…

  1. Use Master Pages: iWeb doesn’t use template pages but EverWeb does with Master Pages. It’s a good idea to think about the common features of your iWeb pages that can be collected together in to one or more Master Pages if your website has more than a few pages. Page dimensions, page and browser backgrounds, navigation menus, header and footer content, social media buttons and the like are ideal to put in to a Master Page. Attach the Master Page to your regular web pages to give your website a consistent design. If you want to change your design at any time, just edit your Master Page and all pages that have it attached will be updated with the changes.
  2. Fonts and Color Settings: Your website probably uses different font styles and sizes. Make a note of anything that you want to transfer over. Check your font and color settings in iWeb and make a note of them so that you can use them in EverWeb. If you have difficulties matching colors, try using the Digital Color Meter that comes with your Apple OS to get accurate color values.
  3. Widgets: You’ll probably find that some of the iWeb widgets you have been using are included in EverWeb, often with updated features and functionality. There are also a lot of other widgets built in to EverWeb that iWeb does not have. If you cannot find what you want, third party widgets are available either free or paid for. Our EverWeb Third Party page has more information.
  4. Update your website: Technology has come a long way since the demise of iWeb over five years ago. Now is a great opportunity to update and modernise your website. If you’re new to EverWeb, check out the features in our YouTubevideos or from our blogs. You may find simpler, modern solutions in EverWeb that iWeb doesn’t have e.g. drop down menus, fixed position, always on top, support for SEO, mobile websites, widgets and so on… Whilst updating may mean adding new features to your website, remember that it’s also an opportunity to streamline your website and update your web page content if you haven’t done so for a while.
  5. Include SEO: iWeb does not include any SEO features so this is one area you should be focus on. The best way to start with SEO in EverWeb is by checking out the SEO for EverWeb Course. Remember, as well as keywords for SEO, rename any image files to be SEO friendly if you have not done so already  e.g. if you have an image of a teapot that has a file name of ‘IMG0001.jpg’, rename it to something more meaningful e.g. teapot.jpg
  6. Optimize and Rationalize: Whilst on the subject of image files, look at your image files and optimize them if they are large to help page loading times. Use a graphics program to reduce the file size to be more web friendly. There’s also retina display now which iWeb does not support. Our YouTube video has more information on using retina images in EverWeb.
  7. Find Your Files: If you can’t locate your original image files, open your website in iWeb and use the File -> Publish to a Folder menu. Once published, your image files will be located in a folder where you can drag and drop the image files from in to EverWeb. iWeb has an unusual file and folder structure so you may find that the original image has been duplicated many times in to different folders. Each iWeb web page has it’s own folder which will contain images, often renamed by iWeb to ‘shapeimage’ followed by a number. Find the best resolution image you can then copy it to another location (e.g. to your desktop) and rename the file to something meaningful. Drag and drop the renamed file in to the Assets List of your  EverWeb project. You can drag and drop the image file from the Assets List as many times as you want on to the web pages you create in EverWeb without having to reimport the image every time.

 

Moving Your iWeb Website to EverWeb

When you recreate your website in EverWeb, the easiest way to bring text over is to cut and paste it from the iWeb page in to the corresponding EverWeb page. For image files, drag and drop them in from their source wherever possible. Remember if you use an image more than once in your website, you only need to import it once in to EverWeb. Once imported, drag and drop the image from the Assets List on to the pages you want to include the image on.

 

Importing iWeb Blog Entries

To import your iWeb blog entries:

  1. Start by ‘exporting’ your iWeb project from iWeb using File -> Publish to a Folder to a location on your hard disk.
  2. Next, go to your EverWeb project file and create a blog if you have not done so already.
  3. To create a new blog select the ‘blank’ theme and the ‘blog’ page style.
  4. When the blog has been created, you will see it in the Web Page List. Click on the ‘posts’ page.
  5. In the Editor Window, click on the ‘Import’ button in the Blog Posts List.
  6. The dialog box displays ‘iWeb’ by default as the import format so click ‘Import’ to continue’.
  7. Navigate to the location of the iWeb project that you exported earlier. If you have more than one iWeb project, you will see all of them listed. Select the folder of the iWeb website blog that you want to import, then click ‘Open’.
  8. Click on the name of the blog in the next dialog box and press ‘Import’ to load the blog entries in to EverWeb.

 

The blog Create Your First Blog Post in EverWeb 2.0! has more information on formatting blog posts.

 

When converting your iWeb website to EverWeb, perhaps the most important task is the planning. Getting to know EverWeb and it’s features is also a good idea if you are new to the product. Getting to know EverWeb will help you decide how best to modernize your iWeb website for today’s needs such as for mobile environments.

 

If you would rather have us convert and update your website for you, please take a look at the Convert your iWeb website to an EverWeb Site post for more information.

 

As always please let us know if you have any comments and questions. We’re happy to help.

 

EverWeb on Social Media

You can also find EverWeb on the following social media platforms:

Facebook

Google+

Flipboard

YouTube

Twitter handle @ragesw

Three EverWeb Productivity Tips for iWeb Users

Wednesday, August 6th, 2014

We get some questions from iWeb users wondering why they should use EverWeb when iWeb may still be working for them. Instead of going through all the new features an EverWeb site can have over an iWeb site, I wanted to discuss three tips that make actually designing and maintaining your site so much easier.

 

EverWeb’s Master Pages

So you’ve built your site with Apple’s iWeb and probably found it very easy to use. But, what happens when you want to make a change to your website’s design? In iWeb, you have to go through every single page to do this.

In EverWeb, you just have to use the super simple Master Pages features. Master Pages let you design your site once and use that design on every single page of your site. Furthermore, you can create an unlimited number of Master Pages if some pages need different designs than others.

Simply go to the File menu and select ‘New Master Page…’. It works just like creating a regular page.

Once your Master Page is created, select the pages on your site that you want to use this Master Page and go to the Inspector and select the ‘Page Settings’ tab(first tab). Right at the top you can assign the Master Page.

Now, you only have to update the design of your Master Page and any page that uses this Master Page gets updated too. Super simple, and extremely time saving!

 

Object Grouping

Have you ever had a group of shapes, images text or design elements that you always want to keep together?

EverWeb has a grouping feature which treats multiple shapes as just one shape meaning they stick together exactly as you have designed them. When you move them around, they all move around as one object.

It’s a great way to better manage your website design.

To use grouping, select the objects you want to group together and go to the File menu and select ‘Group’. You can always ungroup objects in the same manner.

 

Object Locking

Isn’t it annoying when you’ve placed an image or text exactly where you want it but then when moving another object you accidentally move it?

With EverWeb’s object locking you can lock any object in place so it can’t be manipulated until you actually go back and unlock it.

This feature is great to avoid unwanted web page design changes and greatly reduces the amount of mistakes you can make while designing your website.

To lock an object, select it and then go to the Format menu and select Lock. You can unlock a locked object by following these same instructions.

 

There you have it, three great ways to make website design and management much simpler and easier. If you have any productivity tips you’d like to share, please do so in the comments below.

EverWeb 1.2 Adds Master Pages

Wednesday, January 29th, 2014

We’re very please to announce the second major update to EverWeb.

EverWeb is the easy to use website builder that takes up where Apple’s iWeb left off. EverWeb lets anyone build professional, modern websites that work in any web browser, including Internet Explorer.

EverWeb 1.2 adds Master Pages which let you design your website once and have any changes automatically be applied to every page on your site. With Master Pages you design your site once, then assign the Master Page to each page on your site. Each page that uses the Master Page will use the same design and can be updated by simply editing the Master Page.

See How to Use Master Pages in EverWeb

EverWeb 1.2 also fixes problems when working with large websites and improves all around stability. This update is free for users who have an active EverWeb support license. You can also start using EverWeb for free to see if it is right for you.

With EverWeb 1.2, upgrading from iWeb is even easier. You can design your iWeb site once as a Master Page and assign that Master Page to all pages on your site. You won’t have to redesign each page on your site.

Let us know what you think of this update by commenting below.

* EverWeb is a drag and drop website builder that allows you to make your own website without any prior website building experience.

How To Get Rid Of Site Redirect In iWeb & Shorten iWeb URL

Friday, November 23rd, 2012

One of our most popular video tutorials is shortening your iWeb URL. In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to shorten your iWeb URL, but also learn how to get rid of the home page site redirect. For an illustration of this, watch the video below. Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to never miss out on an important video.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this video tutorial, I am going to show you how you can make your iWeb URL not forward to the site name and first page name.

To illustrate what I mean, here is what a typical iWeb URL looks like after typing in the domain name. Notice how ragesw.net turns into ragesw.net/jeremys_golf_shop/clubs.html

Where do each of these part of this URL come from? This part of the URL, the domain name, is the obvious one, as this is what the user selects and purchases when registering a domain. This second part is the Site Name, and it comes from this section of the iWeb publish page. You will also notice it right above the pages in the column on the left. This part of the domain, is the page name. It comes from the name you give to your page in the menu on the left hand side.

So to just give you a bit of background on the way all of this works, whenever you publish an iWeb site, you will see three things right away. The assets file, the site folder, which will have your site name and contain all of your website’s files, and an index.html file. When these items get published to your server, and you subsequently type in your domain name in your web browser, your server will default to the index.html file, which then has a line of code instructing the browser to forward to the first page of your website. That first page of your website is located within the other folder which is labeled with your site name.

Now that we know how all of it works, let’s change it so that our URLs are shorter, and the browser doesn’t forward when we type our domain name into a web browser. In other words, we’re going to change it so that when you type in your domain name in your web browser, all you will see is the domain. Then, when you click to go to a subsequent page on the site, you will only see the domain and the page name. This is the normal way the most websites operate.

I want to quickly mention that doing this will change the structure of your URL, so if your site ranks in search engines and is giving you traffic, then changing this might hurt those rankings.

The first thing we’re going to do is change the name of the first page of our website to index. Make sure you type it in just like I have done. You will notice how I used only lower case letters, and there are no extra characters or spaces. This is an extremely important step, so make sure you have followed the instructions as I just outlined.

There is one other drawback to this. When we change the page name to index, it will show up in our navigation menus. If you’ve watch some of our other tutorials, you will remember how I recommend users to disable the navigation menu that iWeb makes, and create your own. Once again, I will recommend doing this, but if you don’t want to, just make sure you at least take this main page out of the navigation menu by clicking on the Inspector button, clicking on the Page tab, and then un-tick the Include Page In Navigation Menu option. If you want your home page to still have a link in your menu bar, you can add it via a text link, or via an image linked to the homepage. This part is entirely up to you, but I recommend removing the word index from your navigation menu as it might confuse many of your visitors.

Our next step is to publish the site to a local folder on our hard drive. To make things as easy as possible, let’s publish the site directly to our desktops. When I say directly to the desktop, I don’t mean in a folder on the desktop, but rather directly on the desktop.

When we do this, we’re going to see those three items that I mentioned earlier; the assets file, the site folder, and the index.html file.

All we are going to do, is publish just the contents of the site folder. You can do this by dragging and dropping all of these files into your favourite FTP client.

I will show you how to do this using iWeb SEO Tool since I know a lot of users’ next step would be to load their site in iWeb SEO Tool.

So all I will do is drag and drop this folder onto iWeb SEO Tool’s local sites column. Now you can optimize your site for search engines, or press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button to get your old tags back, and publish your website.

When you are done, type your domain name into your web browser, and you will notice that the URL does not change. It will only change when you click on a link to be taken to a different page on your site.

If you are having problems making this work correctly, the first thing I want you to do is make sure that you have correctly typed in the first page of your site as index. If that was not done correctly then this will not work. Also, unless you publish the site folder contents correctly, this method will not work.

Before assuming that you did it incorrectly, try restarting your computer, and checking again. You can also check the website on your phone to see if it works there. Sometimes it can take several minutes to several hours for some users to see the changes. If you are still having trouble, please send us an email.

For more iWeb tips and tricks, please subscribe.

How To Build A Website : Easily Building Your Own Website Using iWeb

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

For those users who are still only now discovering iWeb, below is a quick video introduction to how you can easily build your own website. iWeb is a feature rich desktop application that lets users build a website by just dragging and dropping items on a canvas. If you have any questions about iWeb, be sure to leave a comment below.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how you can easily build your own website using an application called iWeb.

iWeb comes with 28 built-in templates, each consisting of 8 pages.

Let’s click on the first template, which is called White, and select the first page which is the Welcome page.

As you can see the page shows up on the left hand side. This page’s name is Welcome. Right above welcome, you will see another name, usually Site. This is the entire website’s name. So just to recap, you have the site name here, and the page name here. As we add more pages to the site, more page names will appear in this list. These page names can be changed to be whatever you want them to be.

Now if we take a look at the middle section where we will edit our sites, you will see that the template is pretty plain and standard. This is just meant to give the user an idea of what they can do with their sites. So let’s say you wanted to change the heading that reads Welcome to My Site, you can just double click on the text, and delete what is currently there, and type in whatever you want. You can also drag this heading around to wherever you want it to be placed on the site.

Let’s take a quick look at this image we have here. You can add or remove images from your site as you want. You can also resize the image to be whatever size you want. And of course you can drag the image around and move it wherever you want it to be.

If you ever want to add new text to your site, just click on the Text Box button, and begin typing.

You can also add shapes to your site, and change their sizes and colours as you please.

Adding a new page is as easy as clicking the Add Page button, selecting the page you want, and clicking on the Choose button. As mentioned earlier, the new page shows up in the column on the left.

These are the basic items you need to know in order to easily create a simple website. As you get more and more comfortable using iWeb, you will be able to create much more advanced and professional looking websites.

If you take a look at the icons on the right hand side, these will allow you to add items to your website such as a YouTube video, or almost any type of item that requires some sort of code or script.

To see more helpful videos about iWeb, be sure to subscribe. If you have any iWeb related question, feel free to interact with us and let us know.

How To Publish Only Changes With iWeb SEO Tool

Friday, September 21st, 2012

If you want to speed up your publish time when uploading through iWeb SEO Tool, you can publish only your modified files in iWeb. The tutorial below will illustrate exactly what you need to do;

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

If you use iWeb 09, here is how you can publish only your modified files using iWeb SEO Tool.

First, when you make a change to one of your pages in iWeb, you will notice how the page icon turns from blue to red. Red indicates that a change has been made and that this page and all of its files must be republished. When you are finished making changes, make sure that you are publishing to a local folder on your hard drive, and then click on this Publish Site button in the lower left corner of the application. This will only publish the pages and files associated with those red icons.

Next, load the site in iWeb SEO Tool. Click on the Re-Apply Saved tags button. Make any changes you want if any, and then click on the Publish button. On this publish window, ensure that the option for Publish Entire Site is not checked. You can now upload only your changes. This will be the fastest way to publish your site through iWeb SEO Tool. If you were to publish your entire site each time, if would take longer to complete.

Remember, only use this method when you have made changes to your site. If this is your first time publishing with iWeb SEO Tool, you will want to make sure that the entire site is being published. After that initial publish, you can begin using this method.

How To Set Up A Mobile Friendly iWeb Site

Tuesday, September 18th, 2012

More and more users accessing the internet via their mobile devices. As a result it is important for the user experience that the webpages they browse look good on their hand-held devices. The video tutorial below will show you how you can create a mobile friendly version of your iWeb website. Users visiting your website on an iPhone or Android device will automatically be redirected to the mobile version of your website. Be sure to use the sample code for setting up the redirect:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can create a mobile version of your iWeb website, so that users visiting your site on an iPhone or Android will be directed to your mobile friendly website.

In order to follow this tutorial completely, you must have a RAGE Web Hosting account. You can sign up for a hosting account ragesw.com/hosting

You will also need iWeb SEO Tool, or SEIntelligence, which are two applications offered by RAGE Software that allow you to add search engine optimization features to your website.

Our first step in the process will be to setup the address for the mobile site. If you have paid attention in the past to the addresses of websites you have visited on your phone, you may have noticed that typing in facebook.com for example, will turn into m.facebook.com – In this case, M represents mobile.

Now we must set it up so that your address will turn into something similar. The first thing you need to do is login to cPanel. Your cPanel login information was sent to you in your RAGE Web Hosting: New Account Information email. When you are logged in click on the icon that reads Subdomains.

In the Subdomain text field, type in mobile just like you see here. You will notice that your mobile URL will now be the combination of this subdomain plus your domain. So in my case, it will be mobile.ragesw.net. Just a quick note, if you have multiple domains on your account, you can click this drop down menu to select the domain you want to use for the mobile site. You will notice that the Document Root field will automatically be filled with www/mobile. Take note of that because we will be using it later on in the video.

The next thing we are going to do is prepare our mobile sites in iWeb. What we will do is create a new site by going to File and selecting New Site. Since we want our mobile site to be mobile friendly, our best option is to choose the blank page. Now, I’m just going to get rid of this text box, and then disable the navigation menu. This is done by clicking on Inspector, and clicking on the Page tab, and unchecking the options to Include this page in the navigation menu, and DIsplay navigation menu. The reason we do this is because since we want to ensure mobile friendliness, we basically want a blank page and none of the page defaults from iWeb.

With the inspector window still opened to the Page tab, click on the Layout button, and change content width to 300 pixels. This is going to create a mobile size canvas for us to create our mobile sites on. Repeat this for all of the mobile pages you are going to make.

Now you can design a more mobile friendly version of your website. This can include images that are smaller in file size, and larger more compact text. It might be a good idea to visit some mobile friendly websites on your phone so you can get a better idea of how to design your mobile site. One tip is to always include a link to view your full site. A way to do this is to just create a text box that says View Full Site, highlight the text, open the Inspector window, go to the hyperlink tab, click to enable as hyperlink, and type in the non-mobile link for this respective page.

When you are done creating your Mobile friendly site, you will need to publish it. The important thing here is to publish the mobile site to that new subdomain that we just created.

So if you are using iWeb 09, you will go to the publish page by clicking on the site name, and select Publish to FTP server from the drop down menu. Customize the site name and contact email to your liking.

Input your server address, username, and password. In the Directory/Path field, type in the location of your subdomain, which if you remember from earlier, was www/mobile.

In the website URL field, make sure you type in your URL as http://mobile.yourdomain.com. In my case, I will type it in as http://mobile.ragesw.net

When you are all ready, click the Publish Site button to publish the site.

If you are using an older version of iWeb, publish this new mobile site like you would publish your regular site. The most important thing to remember is that you need to publish the site by putting www/mobile in the Directory Path field. If you forget to do this, it will not work, and you risk overwriting your original website, so do not forget about this step.

When the site has been published, you can visit it on your phone by going to mobile.yourdomain.com to make sure everything looks the way you want it to. If not, go back to iWeb and make your changes and then publish the site once again.

Once you are satisfied with the mobile version of your site, there is one last thing that needs to be done in order to make the phone know to send the user to the mobile version of your site.

Go to ragesw.com/blog. In the search field, type in web hosting tutorials, and select the result that reads RAGE Web Hosting Video Tutorials. The direct link to that page is this. On this page, locate and click on the link that reads Setting Up A Mobile Friendly iWeb Site.

On this page, you will see this link that reads “Be sure to use the sample code for setting up the redirect” Click on this link and copy the code that will appear on the page that follows.

Now, before we paste this code somewhere, I want you to first publish your main website from iWeb to a local folder on your hard drive. Then load that local folder into iWeb SEO Tool, or SEIntelligence, whichever program you use. In this example, I am using iWeb SEO Tool, but the same principle applies to SEIntelligence.

With your website loaded in the tool, paste the code that we just copied in the head code section of the Site Settings tab. Replace the URL which reads mobile.ragesw.net to your mobile URL. If you are using SEIntelligence, open the Site Settings tab, and paste the code in the Header Code/Google Analytics box. Also replace the mobile.ragesw.net URL with your mobile URL.

If you have another code in this box, such as Google Analytics, just paste this code above it. Then click on the Apply To Entire Site button.

 

Google Maps Not Working In iWeb Post MobileMe

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

Those of you who have a Google Map on your website might have noticed that after MobileMe was discontinued, your map no longer worked. The video below will show you what to do if you are one of the many users in this situation.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Now that MobileMe has been discontinued, you might have noticed that the Google Maps widget that is included in iWeb will no longer display correctly. Instead, you might see just a piece of that MobileMe is closed sign.

To correct this problem, first what you’ll need to do is remove the Google Maps widget from your iWeb site. You can do this by simply clicking on the widget and hitting the delete key on your keyboard.

Next, go to maps.google.com, and in the search bar, type in the address for your business and hit return to perform the search. Next, click on the icon with the chain link and copy the code under Paste HTML to embed in website.

Now, back in iWeb, drag an HTML snippet onto your page, and paste the code. Your map should appear. If you want the map on multiple pages on your site, click the respective page, drag and drop the HTML Snippet, and once again paste the code.