Building your website through iWeb is easy for basic business websites.
If you have an Apple Macintosh computer and are running OS X Tiger or a higher operating system, then you already have installed pre-packaged software for building websites. As with many other Apple applications, the iWeb software, which is used for building websites, is easy to use and comes stocked with template websites where you can simply type in your text and drag and drop pictures onto your webpage.
Instructions
1. Plan out your website on a sheet of paper. Decide on how many pages you want to plan for as well as what the purpose of each page will be. Be sure that as your plan your page, you keep things as simple as possible, in order for providing the best user experience.
2. Research the websites of other companies or services that provide a product similar to yours. Write down a list of keywords that they use repeatedly in their website, which can help with search engine optimization. Also write down a list of things that you like and dislike about other company's websites so that you can hope to build on what they are already doing, yet provide an enhanced user experience.
3. Open the iWeb application. You will be asked to select a template for your website. Within each template is a subsection of multiple different options for page designs within that template, according to the function of each page. Select the pages that you want for your website. Add pages by hitting the + button and choosing "new page" on the bottom left portion of the screen.
4. Click on the Media button on the bottom right part of the screen. This icon will enlist a pop-up window to help you customize the media files associated with your website. You can choose to add a song from your iTunes library or drag and drop a photo from your iPhoto library. Each template will come with pictures and picture frames already installed. In order to change a picture, simply drag a picture from the Media pop-up display into the picture frame until you see a "+," which indicates that the new picture is going to replace the old picture on the website.
5. Double click on the text boxes, which have text written in Latin. This helps to distinguish between which text is yours and which belongs to the template.
6. Create links around text or images by clicking or highlighting a specific picture, icon, graphic, text box or words and then choose "Insert" on the top navigation bar. Scroll down and click on hyperlink, which give you the option to link the highlighted information to a webpage. Enter the webpage in the pop-up box that appears and select "Make all links inactive." Make the links active by un-checking that same box, however, you cannot grab and move any icon, text box or graphic that is linked unless you have the links set to being inactive.
7. Customize your webpage appearance by opening the "Inspector" icon found at the bottom right part of the screen. The inspector will allow you to change the background as well as the header, footer and content width of the webpage. Other options with the inspector include enabling RSS feeds, text spacing, graphic rotations, frames, shadows and reflections.
8. Use the Help menu at the top right of the screen or type in a question for a search engine if you get stuck on a problem. Chances are that someone else has experienced that same problem and has already addressed it through a forum that you can access by typing in the question.
