Have I told you guys lately how much I love my Mac? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

My wife used iWeb and her .Mac account to create her website http://www.halodesigns.net , and I'm impressed with what she accomplished with it. If you want an entry-level web design tool, iLife is worth the $80-$100 just for iWeb. And $100 a yr for .Mac isn't bad for a person who wants a website up and running without fooling around with the complexities/vagaries of domain hosting or FTP.

Although I helped my wife set acquire a domain name and point it to her .Mac account for a more professional website.

 

[Oren]

Wow, that is a slick site! I'm going to have to work on mine a bit more....

I get the impression that redirecting with masking is pretty common (I do it too).

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Very nice site, Dave. Your wife should be proud.

I actually designed our HTF Las Vegas Event Page using iWeb as well.

iWeb is pretty decent, but far too basic in functionality. I would
rather it allowed for more elaborate web designs. I tried using
the huge Adobe web designer software, but could not figure it out.

At the very least, I wish iWeb offered more templates. I tried
doing a search for templates on the Internet, but found next to
nothing. I hope that iWeb is improved somewhat in iLife 07.

 

[Oren]

Ron, there are some at http://11mystics.com/blog/store/ (some are free too). That's the number one hit on google, so perhaps you already saw them and were unimpressed. And there's these ones too: http://lamiavia.com/Lamiavia/Welcome.html.

Also, everyone should know about iwebmore (http://iwebmore.ctrl-j.eu/iWebMore.html). "With iWebMore you can embed HTML in your iWeb pages and finally have those flash animations, applets and google ads on your website." And check out the various iweb tutorials at http://karreth.com/iweb/iWeb.html.

I'm not affiliated with any of them.

 

[DaveF]

Thanks for the kind words Ron & Oren -- I passed them on to her, and she was very pleased to hear them.

 

[Steven Simon]

Ron,
Try using Dreamweaver... It's fantastic...

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Steve,

I am certain it is the definitive web design program.

However...

See my comment in my post above.

That program is extremely elaborate and rather complicated
for those of us that chose not to pay to get tutored on it by
the folks at the Mac Store.

 

[Eric M Jones]

It pretty much is although some of us still do it the old fashioned way!

For those of you finding iWeb a little lacking you may want to check out Sandvox by Karelia software. I've never used it myself but I've heard good things about it and it apparently is iWeb-ish in ease of use but is more robust in features. http://www.karelia.com/

-EJ

 

[Andrew Pratt]

Dreamweaver does have a GUI design mode that allows you to build a site very easily. Obviously the power is in the raw code but you don't have to know HTML in order to use Dreamweaver. My wife now uses it instead of FrontPage to do her webpage and while she'll come to me for issues by and large she's doing it all in the GUI mode.

 

[Oren]

I hope this doesn't sound like a rant, but my work Windows PC just frustrates me to no end. Finding things is a real pain and quite offen I need to find particular emails. On the Mac, Spotlight is absolutely fantastic. It's fast, reliable, comprehensive, and easy to use.

Searching on a PC is a disaster. The built in search is extremely slow. I tried Yahoo Desktop, but it wouldn't index all my PST (outlook) files. I tried Google desktop, but its interface is horrible and difficult to navigte. I'm now using Cpernic desktop search, but it is proving unreliable (not comprehensive).

It has been a few days since I said how much I love my Mac, so let me just say that I miss it dearly, every day.

"Friends don't let friends buy Windows"

 

[Andrew Pratt]

Microsofts downloadable desktop search tool isn't too bad and it should index your email...its not SpotLight but its better then the others IMO.

 

[ErichH]

I wouldn't know about a P4
By real world I mean running basic apps and feeling the speed. Between the G5 Dual 2.5 PPC and my new Quad 3.0 Intel, running Draw apps like Freehand or illustrator are so close, it's a wink of the eye. Photoshop CS3 is a different story. The way to bog down a G5 is to run a big copy in the background and have a large download going with Photoshop doing math on a large action on multi files. The Intel will share the load much better with 6-8 apps open and half of them running a task.

The 3.0 is silent and the PPC was a wind hog. It boots a little faster and yes you can notice a speed difference in many places, BUT it's nothing to write home about unless you're pushing it hard. Most of us do not opperate that way on a day to day basis.
I tend to stay in the top range of almost every series, but if I'm honest about it, the speed/performance bumps in the last 3 years have been minimal compared to the amount of revisions.
Bottom Line - G5s are still great boxes and half the price of a MacPro. A good choice for someone wanting to get in without sticker shock.

E

 

[Angel Pagan]

Ron, glad to see you made the jump... heck, leap. I switched over in '02 and have never looked back. Whenever my friend asks for recommendations on a new computer yet rejects the mac, I just tell her to get something that rhymes with hell. She'll eventually get just that.

Oh, and I sure as heck don't miss those "missing .dll file" messages I used to get back in the day. That's what drove me to a mac.

Welcome aboard sir.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Hey buddy!

Long time no hear.

You?! A Mac person?

I'll tell you a quick interesting story....

Have a friend I met through the Internet that used to
hang out with me at my old apartment some 15 years ago
and basically taught me most everything I know about
PCs.

He was a hardcore PC user and went into a career that
had to do with website support.

Anyhow, I talk to him now and then and have been afraid
to tell him I went MAC. I thought he'd be insulted.

Well, finally yesterday, I broke the news to him over an
instant message. He wrote back and told me that he switched
to Mac years ago and thought that they were FAR superior to
PCs.

....and it's wild....I have rarely spoken to anyone that has
regretted going over to the MAC side.

 

[JohnRice]

Dave, I probably should just keep my mouth shut, and I hate to rain on the parade, but effective web production involves far more than a good looking design. BTW, the design of that site is very nice and I particularly like how she was avoided the need for vertical scrolling on most monitors. The problem is, the site is virtually invisible to search engines. Much of the most important factors of how productive a web site is are hidden behind the scenes and your wife's site is completely lacking those parts. Unfortunately, building a site entirely with frames, as that site is, typically has severe disadvantages in this aspect, so there is no easy fix. My suggestion is that she either do some reading and research on how to make web sites completely effective from a commercial standpoint, or stick with her strengths by doing the visual design, then passing that on to a web developer who lacks her visual skills, but knows how to make the site perform.

I only say this because when you decide to do web development for pay, you really need to go beyond the purely visual and know how the entire process works.

 

[Oren]

Thanks for the tip. Not spotlight is an understatement! This morning I installed it, and after it said indexing was done I did a search for an email (open ended - results are known to exist). It said there were no results.

So I open up the options for it, select advanced, select file types to index (because, you know, that's an *advanced* concept), see that out of the listed HUNDREDS of file types PST is NOT checked, so I check it, and tell it to index the contents. (I mention all this to indicate how cumbersome it is - no need for tech support.) I wait, it's done indexing, do a search, and no results. Arrrgh!

This is yet another example of how PCs may be penny-smart but pound (dollar) foolish. In my other post, I mentioned how I spent two days trying to get my PC to see my bluetooth phone (never worked), and spent two minutes doing the same thing on a Mac. What good is (or, rather, was) a faster processor in a PC when it still couldn't get the job done?? And now that processor advantage is gone (and price advantage too). Macs are penny-smart and pound-smart.

Now, how much time have I spent fussing with this? Sigh. :frowning:

 

[DaveF]

John, thanks for the comment. Her interest is print-based graphic design, not web design. The website is purely an online business card. That said, I wasn't paying attention to issues of searchability when I helped her with it (she did the design and creation; I consulted on some technical issues ). I'll take a look at that with her and make sure we at least have ALT tags set, along with META data, and other such things.

 

[JohnRice]

Those are some of the things I am talking about. Make sure to have a good description included, taking care to include lots of words people are likely to search for. Plus, using the domain as the title of the main page is completely wasting a valuable resource.

I understand the idea of the web site as a place to direct people interested in her services, but the greatest benefit is getting work from people you never met who are searching for a designer. It's like finding money on the street.

 

[Andrew Pratt]

Its interesting that MS Search doesn't get your email as it finds Outlook Express messages out of the box without any extra settings.