I picked up Apple's iLife 2006 this evening. The new features seem worth it. But I have to tell you that iWeb doesn't appear to be usable. From what I can gather, you pretty much need to use it with .mac. They don't give you any other ftp option. You can write out your site to a folder, but then I guess it's up to you to upload it to your own server. I haven't checked out how the pages are generated so I don't know how well they're optimized for search engines either. Also .mac won't let you use your own domain. This means that your iWeb homepage url will look like this: http://web.mac.com/yourusername/iweb/yourwebsite/ or some crap. Why? The blogging tool also doesn't seem appealing. I really don't want to edit my blog in-line or have it appear to be in-line. It's actually not natural. The ability to blog needs to be available from anywhere at anytime. And so having it part of the browser funtion or on a server makes the most sense still.
I'm not going to totally trash it yet. I'll go to Macworld and watch the demo and then I'll try to build a site with it to see if I'm wrong, but first blush isn't that appealing. The podcast feature is decent in GarageBand (are there going to be that many podcasts?) and so are the new features in iMovie and iPhoto, so I'm happy with the purchase, but I was hoping iWeb would have been much more.
"So go ahead. Join the blogging revolution with iWeb. Viva la you!"
Okay back to regularly scheduled programming...
Update: I just realized... There is no comment function on an iWeb blog... WTF?
