Tips and TricksWeb Design

iWeb questions from the week – 3

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last did a ‘Questions of the week’ post, not because I have been lazy, but the questions I have been asked I have already answered in one way, shape or form elsewhere on this site. Thankfully though there are a few of you still who have a problem or two with iWeb and I am only too happy to help.

If you have an iWeb question that you think I might be able to help with drop me a line through the Contacts page or leave a comment.

This week’s first question is one regarding iWeb Intranets.

How do I link to a folder rather than a file within a folder?

To get round this problem you need to manually insert a hyperlink through a HtML Snippet, adding it through Inspector just wont work. The code you need depends on where your folder is stored but it should look something like this:

<a href="file:\\\/Pathname/Folder/sub folder">Click here to open a folder</a>

The vital part of the code is the start right up to (and including) the three slashes after ‘file:’. For example if I wanted to link to my music folder on my iMac the link would look something like this:

<a href="file:\\\/Users/Tim/Music">Click here to open my music folder</a>

So the path-name to the folder is entirely up to you. You can also change the text for the link too, you are not stuck with Click here to open a folder, it can be what ever you want.

How can I build a database in iWeb?

This is something you can not do in iWeb. If your site does need a database I am afraid you are going to have to find another web design application….but I didn’t say that!

Is there anyway to get more than one image per post onto the blog summary page?

Sadly no there isn’t. The iWeb Blog is controlled by a javascript widget which reads the contents of what ever image is in the defined image holder on the ‘Entries’ page. The only way I can think of would be to make a collage of all of the images you wanted to display in Photoshop, Pixelmator or your favorite image application.

Why does my blog only show 5 entries on the home-page, I want to show 10?

To change the number of entries that display on your iWeb blog summary page you need to take a look in iWeb’s Inspector.

Select the RSS tab and make sure the ‘Blog’ button is highlighted. There you will see under the heading Blog Main Page ‘Number of excerpts to show’. Change this number to what ever you want.

iweb_inspector_rss_tab

I would advise about having the number too high however as long scrolling pages can be a ‘turn-off’ for site visitors and they take longer to load.

My iWeb site has lots of photographs and not much text. How can I do SEO?

Good question! It is true that search engines do tend to look through your page content to find carefully selected keywords to help you get higher up the SEO ladder so if you have an iWeb site jam-packed with photographs how do you get round it. Well for starters you need to download Rage’s iWeb SEO Tool which you can use to give each of your pages a keyword rich (but still meaningful) title.

On top of that it also enables you to add alt-tags to your images. These should also contain keywords which search engines can find.

Finally you need to be careful how you name the actual photographs themselves. Don’t leave them as their default name (such as DSC09123.jpg). If you have a photograph of a tree at night in the moonlight call it ‘tree_in_the_moonlight.jpg’.

Of course you can also add a phrase or two to each thumbnail as well which can be full of keywords, just don’t go mad as the search engines will punish you for it.

You may also like

3 Comments

  1. Excellent Post! I Love This Post! 🙂

  2. […] Go here to read the rest: iWeb Questions of the week – part 3 | All About iWeb […]

  3. The linking to a folder is not a problem, just .zip it 😀

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *