Will I Miss iWeb?

I just read an article at Macworld about iLife '09 that mentions that iWeb received little attention in this release. Part of me is actually pleased because I really feel like I should moving away from that app, so it's nice to know that Apple agrees.

Since I started using iWeb, I've had something of a love/hate relationship with it. Before I moved to it, the family blog was on Blogger and our photos were on Flickr. Becky was never thrilled with that setup and told me she preferred the Lasserre's site, which was created with iWeb and had all of it's content on a central site.

Already a fan of everything Apple, I migrated everything to iWeb. The blog was pretty but kind of cumbersome and I began writing the entries as RTF files using TextEdit, which meant that any edits to a posted entry required me to change the RTF file and then recopy it to iWeb.

Moving our online photo library from Flickr to iWeb was clearly a downgrade, though my hopes were raised when Apple introduced the .Mac Web Galleries, which were integrated with iPhoto '08. The galleries looked really good, however they weren't really integrated into iWeb, so I just created links from my photos page to the individual galleries. All the while I was missing the community aspect of Flickr.

As soon as Phil Schiller mentioned that iPhoto '09 would support exporting to Flickr, I knew it was time for me to dump the Web Galleries and migrate back. I'm guessing it will just be a simple export and not support syncing, but that's pretty much what I have today with the Web Galleries.

I'll also be moving the family blog back to Blogger. I've enjoyed the ability to drag and drop photos into the iWeb blog, but that's the only nice thing I have to say about it. Blogger allows me to use tags and is more likely to get serendipitous visitors. I'm writing this entry on MarsEdit which gives me a nice desktop app to write with but the blog posts themselves live in the cloud.

I'm not abandoning iWeb entirely, hovenkotter.com will still take visitors to that homepage, but I will provide links from there to Flickr and Blogger. Hopefully this will result in a nice compromise between having a nice centralized site for the family with the content out on sites with communities.

Also I'm trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook more to drive traffic to these sites. I don't think that I get a lot of visits from my family or friends because they don't really know when I make updates, and I don't feel comfortable spamming them when I do. Most everyone I know who I think would be a good audience uses Facebook, so having updates to the blog or my photos appear in my feed seems like a natural and nonintrusive way to encourage people to check them out.

I spend more time working on my family's online presence more than anyone else I know, mainly because I enjoy it. It just seems silly to put so much effort into something where hardly anyone really sees it.