How we tested
Weaving our web
We approached all of these apps with the same scenario: we wanted to make our own website, we wanted it to look good even if we had no design smarts of our own, and we wanted to get it done with the minimum of fuss and without having to consult a basic web design manual. That meant using the apps’ supplied templates for our designs but bringing in our own images and text, editing things to get them just-so and then publishing them to our own web space.
The thing about web design is that like many creative endeavours, the more you do the more you want to do. To reflect that we looked at the programs’ abilities to handle more ambitious projects, and how much tinkering they were willing to let you do. Could you download additional features or add your own code? How easy was it to add crucial elements such as search engine metadata (data that describes your pages for the likes of Google) or third party content?
More than anything, we concentrated on user friendliness. iWeb was intended to take the pain out of publishing online, and its true spiritual successor(s) need to do that too.