Tips and TricksWeb Design

iWeb questions from the week – 31 Jul 09

It’s been a while since I have done a ‘Questions from the week’ post, what with holidays and catching up back at work and writing other posts I have preferred to answer e-mailed iWeb questions individually.

Enough of the excuses already!! Lets get on with this week’s questions starting with one about intranets. 

I use iWeb to run and maintain an intranet site at work between 5 Macs. I understand how to create hyperlinks to files in Inspector but can’t create a hyperlink to just a folder that all the files are in.

In order to get a hyperlink to a folder rather than a file you will have to do a bit of editing of the HTML once you have created the site. The easiest way to do it in iWeb would be to create a hyperlink to a file within the folder you want to link to, save and then publish to a folder.

You need a HTML editor (such as the free TextWrangler) installed to edit the code. Navigate to the folder on your Mac where you saved your iWeb site, then navigate to the page that has the link on.

Open that page in the HTML editor. You now need to do a search (Cmd +F) for the hyperlink you created so do a search for the file name. It should look something like this:

<a href="/user/folder/sub-folder/docname.txt">Link Name</a>

Obviously the user, folder, (and perhaps) sub-folder names are all dependant on your link. All you have to do though now is delete the filename (shown above as docname.txt and add file:\\\ after the first speech marks.

The link should then look like this:

<a href="file:\\\/user/folder/sub-folder/">Link Name</a>

And that is all there is to it. Just save the page and publish as normal. When a user clicks on the link the folder will open rather than the document it was linked to.

I do like the themes that are available for iWeb but I really want my iWeb site to stand out rather than look like many others. I don’t want to trawl hundreds of sites looking for inspiration so where is the best place to go for ideas?

I asked myself this very question a few years ago. I enjoy surfing the Internet and in fairness I would sdo it all day everyday if I could. I love looking at beautiful web-sites, whether they are created in iWeb or not. If you want a quick ‘burst’ of inspiration there is nothing like looking at a web-site template site. A favorite of mine is Hypertemplates. It is full of site ideas, split in to different categories. Inspire yourself!!

I want to make my iWeb site as accessible as possible as it is aimed at people with sight difficulties, should I just make my text really big?

Accessibility should be in the mind of every web designer whether they are designing for visually impaired people or not. You don’t have to make your text really big (sometimes that has the opposite effect that you want) you just have to simply ensure your page is laid out well, perhaps increase the line spacing a little (using the text tab in Inspector) and make sure all your images have alt-tags (Rage iWeb SEO Tool).

Additionally, by default iWeb uses the unit of ‘pt’ for setting its fonts. You could make sure that all your fonts are set in ’ems’ instead by using a HTML Snippet.

<p style="font: 1em/1.3 Arial, Verdana; color: #000;>
Paragraph text goes in here.</p>

You can change the font name, color and size to suit your site by following the tutorial I published recently on adding header tags to your iWeb site.

How can I get rid of the ‘Read more’ link after the blog entry. It is just a short entry and there is no more to read.

Unfortunately you can’t. The blog part of iWeb is created separately in its own widget and reprogamming it is not really an option. You have 2 options, write a long blog entry or use a different application for blogging and create a link from your iWeb site to your new blog.

What’s the best width for an iWeb site? I think the 700px is too narrow.

In days of old when the internet had just started and we were all sitting at home with our computer monitors set at 800x600px a 700px width web-site would have filled the screen. Thankfully times have changed and most people now have bigger monitors with their resolutions set at a much bigger scale.

Your iWeb site width really depends on who you are aiming your iWeb site at. If you think that the majority of your users will still be using small screen resolutions keep it low otherwise crank up the page width.

You can check the w3schools monitor stats page to see the most popular screen resolutions at the moment (currently 1024 x 768px or higher) so if you set your page width to 900px your site will be nicely sized in the ‘average’ browser.

That’s it for this week folks, there were a few more questions obviously but the answers were sso long I made them into separate posts. Don’t forget, if you have a question about iWeb you can leave a comment or get hold of me through the contact page.

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2 Comments

  1. Thank you Tim for more tips. The size of newer websites is an important bit to know.
    when I started iweb I was just going by the built in format and that is outdated and small now. I never thought to look at the page size and change that until you suggested. also the tip about using Rage is something I will use.

  2. […] See the original post here: iWeb questions from the week – 31 Jul 09 | All About iWeb […]

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