Tips and TricksWeb Design

iWeb page templates – We want more!

When you look at the 8 default page templates in iWeb it soon becomes pretty obvious that it is designed to get your photographs, music or videos on to the Internet, tell the world a little bit about yourself and that is about it. Through using the tutorials and tips available on this site and others dedicated to iWeb many users have tweaked these default templates and have produced some well made iWeb sites for other purposes.

Wouldn’t it be nice though if Apple were to included some other popular page templates in to their themes, such as a contact page. Here’s a list of pages that I think Apple should consider adding to the next version of iWeb and some you should consider adding to your iWeb sites now. Why not add a comment at the end if you can think of any more.

Contact Page. This is probably the most important page on a web-site that we don’t get a template for. There is absolutely no reason why your web-site shouldn’t have a contact page even if it just a plain page with your e-mail address in the middle of it; or you could follow my tutorial on how to add a form to your iWeb site.

Privacy Policy. If you have a contact page, strictly speaking you should have one of these too. Admittedly each iWeb site will be different but a basic ‘coverall’ solution would be nice too. As a matter of interest (and because I don’t have one) All About iWeb DOES NOT and WILL NOT pass your details on to any third party.

FAQ Page. If Apple gave us the template for a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page we wouldn’t keep moaning about the fact that we can’t do anchors easily in iWeb; they would be done for us already. And if we didn’t want to use the page for FAQs at least the anchor infrastructure would be there for us to edit.

404 Pages. The ability to create a custom 404 error page would be fantastic in iWeb. Okay we can design one from a blank and upload it to our FTP server (if our host allows them) but MobileMe users don’t even get the chance to do that.

Product Page/Shopping Cart. For all of you who have tried to add a PayPal shopping cart to your site you will know how difficult it can be to add a products page to your iWeb site. We have Google Adsense built in, why not Google Checkout too?

Sitemap Page. Every time you add a page to your iWeb site, this page would get updated automatically and a link would appear in your footer in plain text. This would not only help search engine spiders crawl out iWeb sites, but make the job of creating a site map so easy.

There’s my list of pages I would like to see made into regular templates within iWeb, I would be very interested to see what you have to say; why not leave a comment.

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8 Comments

  1. […] Original post: iWeb page templates – We want more | All About iWeb […]

  2. Tim,
    Entirely agreed with your request, I will love to have all these pages added to the next version of Iweb. I would love to have comments integration as well for non mobileme users, as well as a search feature (also non available to non mobile me users).

    Now regarding your requests here is how I (partially) solved them:

    Contact Page: I used Google Apps and created a Contact form and paste the code in a html snippet. Not very pretty for my site: http://www.wesdotphotography.com/Contact.html but very efficient

    Privacy Policies: I found these free policies here: http://www.freenetlaw.com/ where you can use their templates for free as long as you live the bottom mention on your site, look here: http://www.wesdotphotography.com/Copyright.html They cover Copyright, Disclaimer, Cookies and Privacy Policies. I just slightly modified them in order to fit my needs.

    FAQ: I have no use of it yet, but it will be nice to have one.

    404 page: I had the hardest time to implement this one with the Google Webmaster tools and give it up, but because I redirected in my webhosting company their standard 404 error page to my site it work OK with my own design, check it here: http://www.wesdotphotography.com/HomeSS.html

    Product page/Shopping cart: Implementing Google checkout for me still a challenge but Paypal was easy, I also wrote a blog entry about how to create “add to cart” buttons in Paypal here: http://www.wesdotphotography.com/Blog/Entries/2009/3/12_Create_Paypal_%22add_to_cart%22_button.html

    Sitemap page: This is still an issue for me, I would love to find a tool that could create a site map for my site so I do not have to do it myself, I asked in Apple Iweb community but still no answer. I may have to do it manually. If somebody knows of one I will love to hear from them.

    I hope my few tips above will help somebody also.
    Thanks

    Thierry
    Webmaster (almost Master)
    http://www.wesdotphotography.com/Home.html

  3. I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.

  4. Never could figure out how to create a site map. Anyone know how to do this?

    1. Sammie,

      Sign up for Google’s Webmaster tools and create one there. It’s easy and they are the experts!!

      Tim

  5. Sammie,
    There is no tool that I know of. There is this apple discussions here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1986298&tstart=0
    As you can see it is a challenge.
    Thierry

  6. Hi Tim

    I tried with the Google Webmaster tool but it only seemed to see my home page, do you know why this is and what I can do about it. Can I just add more links in their html file to the other pages on my site?

  7. Hi

    I created a Sitemap as Google suggested, as an html file and added an entry for each page on the site. I keep it in the Sites folder on the iDisk and then after every time I republish I copy and paste it into the websites folder and then resubmit it to Google. Sometime I think if it’s done quick enough resubmitting is not necessary, not sure.
    There are 17 pages from this site currently listed in google analytics out of 91 submitted, but having said that it hasn’t been registered long with them.
    Another site which I did earlier has 16 pages listed out of a total 17 submitted.
    http://www.loughagherywaterski.com.

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