Make iWeb sites more sophisticated

Dec 21, '07 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: willbank

Amongst WYSIWYG web site creators Rapidweaver, Sandvox and even Freeway 4 are regarded as more proficient than Apple's humble iWeb. This is mainly because of their ability to incorporate external code to add flexibility, and the fact that iWeb 1 made sites that responded very poorly to search engine spiders, etc. (and with no explicit provision for adding keywords and other meta-tags).

As is well known, with the release of iWeb 2.0, Apple added some scope for external HTML snippets and some Google AdSense integration. However, there have been some other useful changes. With an app like BBEdit, you can take the HTML output of an iWeb 2 site (published to a local folder) and run the Multi-File Search Find & Replace function on the whole folder to instantly add new HTML, such as your Google analytics code. Therefore with a simple Find on , you can replace it with...

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "**-*******-*";
urchinTracker();
</script>
</body>
...on all pages at once. I run three such Find & Replace routines to add a range of meta-tags, change a couple of page titles, and to add the code above. Then you upload these changed pages with your favorite FTP program.

I am no HTML expert (by any means at all), but I now have the graphical flexibility of iWeb's undoubted WYSIWYG excellence, but with a quick way to force it to be more grown-up about its search-engine compatibility. And I am sure someone with better skills than me could do lot more. Should you wish to examine the source code of a working example then check out this site and view the source -- there you can see the insertions I've made via global search-and-replace.

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071212015643605