420 Publishing a Website
Deciding the Site’s Purpose
Before you start building a website and sharing it with the entire world, it
wouldn’t hurt to develop a quick plan. Let’s begin by answering two questions:
What do you have to share?
Whom are you trying to reach?
Although these may seem like simple questions, they’ll help you assess what
you have and what you want to do with it. Do you have pictures you want to
share? Do you want to post highlights of your vacation with a blog? Do you
have videos you think others will want to watch? Making an inventory of your
website’s contents will help you build the website from the ground up, just like
the blueprints you’d use to build a house.
The second question relates to your audience. By identifying who you think will
come to your page, you can tailor the site’s appearance and content accordingly.
If you’re using iWeb to make a website for your business, that site will look very
different from one created to share photos with friends and family.
In this lesson, you’ll build a website that highlights a trip to Bhutan. The site
will include a homepage that welcomes visitors, a page that shows photos from
your trip, and a page to show a video that you edited in iMovie.
Choosing a Theme
Now that you’ve determined what you’re going to say and who you want to say it
to, it’s time to start making other decisions. The first step is to choose is a theme.
iWeb, iLife’s application for creating websites, has 28 Apple-designed themes
to choose from. Each theme has its own style, and the one you choose will
depend upon how you answered the questions at the start of the lesson.
For example, you might choose Darkroom to share your best photos with
other photo enthusiasts, or you might choose Notebook for an online journal.
Which theme you choose is really a matter of personal taste, but you should
keep your audience in mind. If you’re designing a website for a business, you’ll
find many classic and modern themes to choose from. Similarly, there are lots
of fun and playful themes designed for kids and teens that should match what-
ever “feel” you want your site to have.
Choosing a Theme 421
Each of these site themes provides eight template pages for the various kinds
of web pages you might use on your site. There are pages designed specifically
for blogs, photos, videos, and podcasts as well as versatile blank pages that you
can use for purposes that the other iWeb page templates don’t address.
Let’s start building a website! We’ll begin by picking a theme.
1 Open the iWeb application.
The iWeb icon is placed in your Dock when you install iLife, but if you
don’t see it there, you can find it in your Applications folder. When you
open it for the first time, iWeb displays a template chooser sheet. (If you
don’t have a MobileMe account, iWeb presents a MobileMe signup dialog
that you’ll need to fill out before iWeb will display the template chooser.)
422 Publishing a Website
NOTE
MobileMe is an online subscription service offered by Apple that
offers many benefits. It can be used to store your important information
in an online server, or “cloud.” It can also be used as a backup location for
important files. With iWeb, you can use your MobileMe account to host
your website and all of its video and photo files. You can sign up for a free
trial at http://www.apple.com/mobileme/.
NOTE
If iWeb has been run previously, it may already have a site cre-
ated, and you won’t see the webpage template chooser. If that’s the case,
choose File > New Site to open the chooser.
2 On the left side of the template chooser, you’ll see a scrolling list of
themes. Scroll down the list to see the different choices you have, then
scroll back to the top of the list and select the Modern Frame theme.
In the right pane, you can preview the theme. You’ll see thumbnails for
each of the eight templates iWeb offers.
Let’s make our first page for the site.
3 Select the Welcome template and click Choose.
NOTE
Although you’re starting with the Welcome template, you can
choose any of the templates as your first page. This first page will be the
homepage for the site. You can then choose to add any kind of page to
your site at any time. Additionally, you can rearrange pages in your site,
so the order in which you build the pages is not important.
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