iWeb - has anyone here used it?

[Frost Sheridan]

somewhat recently i picked up a copy of iLife '08, a suite of creative software made by Apple during the mid to late 2000s. it included iWeb, a drag-and-drop website editor that lets you build basic personal websites and blogs by adding elements and widgets to a variety of pre-made themes. i've been playing around with it a bit, and while it's far from the most flexible or powerful website builder out there, it seems like a pretty fun program for whipping up quick-and-dirty personal sites! sadly, it hasn't received an update since 2011 and can't even run on the newest versions of macOS due to being a 32-bit program, but it's still totally usable on an older mac that's running a pre-Catalina (10.15) version of macOS.

has anyone else here ever heard of or used iWeb before? i'm curious to see what you've made with it, and if you happen to have any cool custom or third-party themes for it still around, please share!

[Melooon]

I wrote a big reply to this ages ago but I had a network issue and it got lost 

But yes! iWeb was the first web making platform I used back on my very first (not handmedown) laptop! After my parents split up I was traveling back and forth between them every week and I kept hogging their computers when I was around; so they got me a white Macbook 13 2007 model; it came with iLife 06 

That summer we went on holiday; there were supposed to be some other kids coming, but things didn't work out and I was the only non-adult there for the whole 2 weeks, also there was totally no internet, so all I had were the pre-installed applications on my laptop, a camera and a whole lot of time!

As a "protest" I pretended that I was like Tom Hanks in castaway with his football friend, but instead of a football I found a melon in the shopping basket and used that! (Can you tell where this is going?) I took the melon all around that summer and photographed it, and when I found iWeb on my laptop I was super excited and decided to make a website for the melon. It was called Project Melon, and also there was a mysterious club called Club Melon you could join if you knew the password, there was also a blog I made for it called Melon Times. I actually had an .Mac/MobileMe subscription so I was able to put my sites online using that, although I don't think anything of them remains now.

The melon name stuck around though, and when I found neocities about 10 years later it was very much reprised 

All that is to say; iWeb in some small way saved that summer and left some lasting memories! I recall it being a bit clunky, and the sites never really gave me as much freedom as I knew I wanted even back then long before I knew HTML; but having a simple way to just make a site and get it out there was so cool. Id like to play around with it again and Id love to see more people using it for neocities sites.