Easy Mac websites and podcasts

I'm sitting here listening to MacVoices' Chuck Joiner interview Steve Sande about Steve's new ebook, Take Control of iWeb: iLife '08 Edition.

I had the privilege of being the editor on this project for Take Control Ebooks. Steve's got a wonderful way of explaining things, and he did a particularly good job of pointing out some powerful hidden features in iWeb, a part of Apple's iLife '08 software suite.

Let me start by saying that iWeb has nowhere near the power of full-fledged web design software like Dreamweaver and GoLive. You absolutely cannot muck with the HTML code (though you can paste "HTML snippets" into the templates). But iWeb virtually guarantees that, using its attractive templates and themes and taking advantage of its tight integration with iPhoto, you'll have an impressive-looking site. (That's why, though I blog with Google's Blogger, I did my professional resume with iWeb.)

After working with Steve on his book, I was inspired to put some audio and video pieces online with iWeb. It turns out that putting up videocast files from iMovie or podcast files from GarageBand can be done in a matter of seconds with iWeb. Steve also shows you a variety of ways to put iPhoto content onto the web, and has some downright amazing ways to edit images for the web using iWeb's Instant Alpha feature.

Previously, iWeb required you to publish your website on Apple's membership service, .Mac. Now, though it still requires .Mac membership, you can publish an iWeb-designed site seamlessly through .Mac so that it appears at your personal web domain (i.e., www.yourdomainname.com).

Taking a cue from Google's Blogger, the new iWeb allows you to add widgets with RSS feeds, forms, e-commerce—it's quite slick. Interested? Steve explains it all, with tons of great screenshots to illustrate the processes.