Tips and Tricks

Your iWeb questions

Well when I your I don’t mean all of you but a few of you. I have been catching up on some of my e-mails and decided to pick some of the more popular questions that you have asked and put them all in a post. I used to do this a while ago but haven’t done it for a while now, although it is a great way of answering so many e-mails in one swoop. So rest assured this will (I hope) become a regular occurrence once again. Just keep the questions coming.

To start with this week we have a question about having 2 Macs and only one site, how do you do the updates?

The answer to this is a simple one, just follow my recent post entitled ‘One iWeb blog – lots of iWeb blog authors’ but rather than upload your domain file to a file sharing site, just stick it on a USB stick.

How can I stop Google indexing my HTML Snippets a separate pages?

Not such an easy answer this one. When you insert a HTML Snippet in to your site, iWeb does indeed create a new page just for the code you use. It then creates a link within its page to link directly to the extra page it created so that when a browser loads your HTML Snippet it looks as if it is actually part of the page (think iFrames).

One solution is to use a text-box expanded to the correct size within which you type one word (and one that doesn’t appear anywhere else on the page to save confusion). You save you site to a folder then, using a HTML editor you search open the page up to view its code, select Ctrl+F to search for that word you typed earlier and replace it with the code you would have put into the HTML Snippet.

This may not work for all codes however so give it a try first.

Why do my punctuation symbols appear as 3 or 4 strange characters on my iWeb page?

You need to contact your web-site host to sort this problem out, they should be able to adjust the settings in your hosting package to get it sorted, the problem is NOT with iWeb.

How can I get my iWeb blog users to share my posts on social networking sites?

This was covered in one of my very early post on All About iWeb although it is still relevant today. Take a look at my ‘Add social bookmarking to iWeb’ post and all will be revealed. As an aside, I have been asked how I got my ‘SexyBookmarks’ bar on All About iWeb and I will be running a tutorial on that in the near future.

Why don’t my iWeb site’s fonts look the same on other computers?

If you want to use a rare but beautifully crafted font on your iWeb site and absolutely nothing else will do then you must be prepared for it to look different on other computers. Your iWeb site (although this applies to ALL web sites) may look good on your Mac where the font is installed, but if a user opens your site and they don’t have that font installed then their browser will just revert to a web safe font such as ‘Times Roman’ or ‘Arial’.

Your safest bet is to keep fancy fonts to a minimum; if they are in headings or logos you could consider converting them to images which iWeb would do automatically if you  add a very slight transparent shadow. The main body of your text should always be in a readable, web safe font.

Is it possible to run a store through iWeb?

Yes it is. I run (when I get the chance) themesforiweb.com which is built entirely in iWeb. The ‘buy now’ and ‘checkout’ buttons are all provided by E-Junkie. Okay, you have to pay for the service but it is minimal; I pay just $5 a month which I think is excellent value. Once you have provided details of your products you will be given a code for a button (or buttons) for each item.

E-Junkie is one of the few store related sites that allows you to sell ‘downloadable’ items such as iWeb themes.

If enough of you are interested, leave a comment and I shall write a post on how to add the buttons.

How can I get my iWeb page to get wider than 4000px?

By default iWeb does set a page maximum page width of 4000px, which, if you want 4,500px is not very helpful. To get round this restriction you will have to do a bit of editing of the code of the site. You should set your site width to 4000px using iWeb’s Inspector then save it all to a folder.

Once that is done open your site in a HTML editor and search/replace all instances of  “4000”  with “XXXX”, where XXXX is your desired width.

There is a downside however, even if you do expand the width of your page you still can’t effectively use it in iWeb because as soon as you open it up again within iWeb it will revert back to 4000px.

As always, if you have any questions regarding iWeb get in touch through the contacts page and I shall endeavour to see what I can do to help.

You may also like

15 Comments

  1. I have a question, how do I get my gif. banner and turn into a button ?

    My plan is to when you hit that animated gif button it will open a window of a image, that is what I want to do.

    Hops someone can help me on this.

    thanks

  2. Dear Tim,
    About “store within Iweb”: I use Paypal and it work great (it was easier to implement than Google Checkout).
    I wrote a blog entry about how to create a button using Paypal: http://www.wesdotphotography.com/Blog/Entries/2009/3/12_Create_Paypal_ADD_TO_CART_Button.html
    Hope this help people who want to use Paypal services.

    Thanks for your great site, I visit everytime you post something else.
    Thierry

  3. Can you do another contest for the best iWeb site created with no themes? I din’t know about your site when you held the pervious contest, but I know I would have done well.

    P.S. I have a new custom design on my website:
    http://www.GravityBeats.tk/ (Keep in mind I am only 12 years old.)

  4. Having spent some time setting up a new in iweb I also wanted to upload photos in albums, to share with friends and family. To my horror I discovered, that I had to upload from iPhoto. At least this is what I concluded after some initial research… Please let me know if there are other options as I really don’t like iPhoto… Can it be done manually, could I upload flash or html galleries created i Lightroom?

    Cheers

    L

  5. hey i wanted to know if we can make pop up menues, like the mouse goes on top of the word and a menue comes down. if so can you e-mail me with instructions. if you cant do it on iweb how can you do it?

  6. Hi Tim,

    I’m looking for a (free) flashbanner product, like this one: http://www.freshcotton.com/
    I tried Bannerzest and Autoviewer, but maybe you have a better option?

    Greetings,
    Marcel

    http://www.cottonmouth.nl
    http://www.sjeurt.nl
    http://www.ftblltshrts.com

  7. My iweb is not responding what can I do?

  8. Please do write more on web stores! The more the better!

    Thank you!

  9. I’m a real novice.I made a site using iweb 09.with a domain name bought from fasthosts.co.uk.I pointed fasthosts at webme.com,but I can only see my site if I type nigeljames.net if I type http://www.nigeljames.net I get nothing,probably something simple but a fundamental flaw for me

  10. My pc-using family cannot see the images on my iweb blog. What am I doing wrong? Or is it a setting in IE they need to change? Really strange. The page loads, the pics show for a second, then disappear. If you mouse over them, they show but just temporarily.

    Any solutions?

  11. I agree with Stephanie I need some more ideas to make my web store pop and how to advertise my website better!

  12. Hey Tim!

    Any chance of that ‘Sexy Bookmarks’ post soon? I’d love to learn more on how to customize that blog page… I’m getting tired of applying all my style changes with each new post.

    Thanks!

  13. hi! i really appreciate your website and tips regarding the use of iWeb. our non-profit currently uses homestead to host our site. i’ve been using iWeb to do an overhaul of the site they had made for us (which was very outdated). we recently purchased a merchant account through them, simplestore, and i have no idea how to get this to work with what i’ve already made on iWeb. how do i implement their checkout tools, etc on our iWeb site? any help would be very much appreciated!! thanks!

  14. Great job with all the info and tools you teach… learned a lot. 2 questions…
    1 – How can I change my Home or Welcome page and folder so it’s like Index.. iWeb outputs the Index.html outside the folder, and it’s the same as the First Page of the web, therefore it creates an extra folder names that appear within the URL… how can I fix that? I don’t want the extra words…
    2- I loaded the web into the SEO Tool for iWeb and did all it’s supposed to, then I uploaded my new filw to FTP – all good… But now when I make a change to my files and want to apply the SEO Tool again, I choose my website file to load… and it loads forever and weel is spinning and never stops and can’t do the updates anymore… Please help.. Thanks, LUKE

  15. How can I add a search option to my iWEB website (I want to be able to search only my website internally)

Leave a Reply to lily Cancel reply

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