In place of iWeb, try... Word Press
If you can’t or don’t want to just swap
your iWeb pages from MobileMe to another host, take this opportunity to
consider all the alternatives. In particular, it might be a good idea to switch
to a content management system (CMS), which treats your site as a repository of
words and pictures displayed dynamically in a styled container, rather than a
series of fixed pages. This is a much more future-proof approach, and WordPress
is the first CMS we’d try.
Word Press
WordPress is available as a free download
from wordpress.org for installation on any server running PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL
5. This covers the vast majority of consumer-level hosting deals, and many ISPs
offer the app as a one-click install option from your domain control panel; it
takes about five minutes.
There’s an even quicker and simpler alternative,
however, which is to go to wordpress.com (rather than .org) and sign up for a
free ready-hosted blog, which just works. You lose all of the control and
flexibility of hosting your own site, but it’s a very easy start.
One of the major advantages of using a CMS
is that when you want to make a change to the look of your site you can simply
install a new theme; in much the same way you could change the theme in ¡Web,
without having to redo any of the content. WordPress includes a simple theme
installer that lets you browse an online repository and apply a new look
instantly.
Once you start to get more confident, you
can edit the code of these themes, either using the built-in editor or in a
suitable editor on your Mac, such as CSS Edit, which lets you tweak the
underlying styles while previewing the live results.
WordPress dashboard
Each template consists of a series of tags
that extracts your content from an underlying database and slots it into the
appropriate positions on your pages. With a rich text editor and media upload
tools built in, the server-hosted app includes everything you need to publish
online from anywhere you have access to a browser.
WordPress’s editing tools have received a
series of significant upgrades over the last few revisions, and it now offers a
distraction- free full-screen editing mode. If you prefer to work with a
regular app, try MarsEdit, (red-sweater.com/marsedit), which offers both HTML
and rich text editingthat works like a regular word processor, and can embed
images directly from your Lightroom, Aperture, ¡Photo and even Flickr
galleries.
An active community of developers is
constantly working on plug-ins to extend WordPress, and most can be downloaded
for free from a database of over 18,000 components. These, combined with a
Widget system that lets you drag and drop elements in your site’s sidebar, go
some way towards replicating the Widgets feature in iWeb.
“Take this opportunity to consider all your
options. It mignt be time to switch to a CMS like WordPress”
WordPress is often associated with blogs,
but even if that’s not your thing and you never used ¡Web’s blogging tools,
don’t make the mistake of thinking WordPress won’t suit you. It makes a
distinction between posts and pages. Posts are more frequently updated entries,
like blog items, diary entries, club news, sports results and so on. Pages have
a longer shelf life, and although they traditionally comprise contact and
'about’ information by default, there’s no reason why they couldn’t be the
individual pages of a portfolio, or product and service details on a business
site. WordPress is highly flexible. You can choose which page appears as the
site homepage by clicking Settings > Reading in the WordPress dashboard.
All the content you create is held in a
MySQL database (though you don’t need to be aware of this in the slightest),
and building your site in this way means that if you ever need to switch hosts
in the future you can export your o WordPress database and feed it into an
installation on a different server, complete with links, images and metadata.
Content can even be extracted for using on a different platform. If you’ve
followed our advice to sign up to Dropbox, the BackWPup plugin (backwpup.com)
will perform daily, weekly or monthly automated backups of your site to your
Dropbox.
