creating a church website with an apple – Part 2 – iweb
Yesterday, I gave a top ten list of why you should buy and apple if you are wanting to create a church website yourself. It might help if I give you some background as to why I decided to go on this “apple” tangent. Toward the beginning of the year, the youth pastor of the church community I go to came to me telling me how he had been researching the costs of creating a church website. He has some html knowledge but would be the first to say that he was no web programmer and he did not have the time to learn to be one.
His objective:
- I need it to be quick
- I need it to be easy
- I need it to look good
- and I need it to be cheap
It wasn’t like he wanted much… 
We went to lunch many times over the website issue and that is about the time I had just purchased my new Intel Core 2 Duo 120GB Hard Drive 2GB Ram Black Macbook….. complete with white apple stickers for my car… I had been looking at iweb and realized it was meeting many of the needs he wanted out of a website. It was easy to use, it was quick to get your website going, the templates looked good and could be modified and compared to the costs of custom web development… It was CHEAP. DING DING… I think we found a winner.
Why do I think iweb is a winner. Here is my list:
1. iweb is based on a “drag and drop” mentality. If you want a picture in a certain place you can drag a picture from your iphoto or another file and it appears where you put it. It works the same way with video… and it even embeds the player automatically. Not to mention it gives you free control to move the video anywhere you want it to be. If you have ever tried to put video into a website using HTML or another form… you know this is a nice, nice feature.
2. iweb is quick. When I said in my last post that you could have a website up in one day; I wasn’t kidding. All you do is add all the pages you want into iweb, put all your pictures, video’s, text, and other stuff in it, and then click on publish. Thats it. Done! You have two options to publish your site. For $99 you can purchase a .mac account and when you click publish… your site is active that minute… no joke! The other option is to publish to a folder and then you can use a ftp editor to move the folder to your own web host. This option is more for the do-it-yourselfer’s out there that want to use there own hosting.
3. iweb looks good. Do I really need to say much here… it’s mac software… everything looks good.
4. Iweb is cheap. Here is the one where most people would try to disagree with me. Yes a macbook or imac will run you close to $1,000. The imac is around $900. But here is what I told my friend… I asked him to give me an estimate of how much time he had spent trying to figure this website thing out. I then asked him to factor in the time it was going to take to learn the software he needed to learn in order to get a website like what he wanted (I’m not talking a cookie cutter website here). Lastly I asked him to factor in the cost of buying the service or software he needed then include the cost of the time I had him think about earlier. Needless to say, $1,000 dollars was cheap compared to what it would really cost to get a website the other way. I think I have him sold on it.
Hopefully this has given you some things to think about when deciding on your next church website. Questions??? Leave a comment and I will get back to you.
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:17 am
Brandon is right! This has to be the easiest way to create a website on the planet. I was messing around the other day trying to make a blog in Blogger. iWeb is way easier than that. iWeb adds excellent, professional look to your site. You don’t have to worry about starting from scratch either. It has some great templates that you can start with, and tweak. After using iWeb, I wouldn’t know where to start if I didn’t have it.
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:29 am
"complete with apple stickers for my car…" – i love it!
January 25th, 2007 at 8:13 am
This is great for someone who wants a quick nice looking web site. Apple’s are made with the end user in mind. Heck, most only have one mouse button! But I do love apples. I am a certified OSX Help desk tech, and can tell you apple has a way of making things easy. I will have to pass this on to people needing a quick web site. Although, you do miss the power of functionality, and that is really what is important in my humble opinion.
January 25th, 2007 at 11:44 am
I did overlook functionality, thanks for the reminder. Apple’s are definitely functional. I have never seen something so easy to use but still deliver a great looking website at the end. They do so much more than just websites though. One other cool feature I like is the ability to tell iphoto to print a book, calendar, or postcard for you. Basically, iphoto sends your artwork (done in iphoto) to apple, they print and bind the book, calendar, or postcard and ship it to you. There are so many things a person could do with this in ministry. Thanks for the comment.
March 27th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Hey Guys,
I really dug this article! I’m planning on buying a mac this spring. I do have some concerns that I wondered if you have any experience with.
I’ve never put up a site before. At least not one that required to any money that is.
I’m looking at using either godaddy or yahoo as a hosting site, but I’m not sure.
Basically, how easy is it to use iweb if you don’t use .mac?
I just want a simple site and domain name, but I really want to use iweb to do it.
Any advice?
- tom
warren, mi
April 1st, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Tom,
Actually with iWeb 08 it is as easy to post via FTP to a website host as it is to post it to your .mac account. There are two options when you go to publish the website, you have “Publish to .Mac” or “Publish to Folder”. Instead of using the Publish button on the bottom or the “Publish to .Mac simply choose “Publish to Folder”. Once it is published to a folder on your hard drive you simply use a FTP client and transfer the files over onto your host server. VERY SIMPLE!!! I use FireFTP for my client and its very good. Of course you have to have firefox installed since it is an add on to Firefox. Our church does not use Yahoo or Godaddy so I don’t know how easy it is to set up using those hosts, and they may charge if you decide to choose your own domain name without having “yahoo”, or “godaddy” in front of your church domain name. If you have any trouble with iWeb check out the help/discussion forums on apples website. Thats one thing Microsoft has not gotten the hang of yet, to provide an easy way to find help about a specific program.
Got my macbook pro last fall and could not have asked for a better computer. Nothing comes close to this computer. Microsoft will have a hard time staying ahead of apple once people realize how much money they are losing by staying with Microsoft. I am trying to convert my church to go all Mac, just look at the OS. I mean 120 bucks for Mac OSX 10.5 and almost 300 for a comparable product by Microsoft.
To say the least your are taking the right step by switching to apple. Be sure to use the Apple support to find any additional information about converting from windows to apple. They have a whole section devoted to just those types of questions.
Good luck Tom,