iWeb Loads Too Slow

The site that I built with iWeb loads too slow.

Now I love Apple computers and I have been a mobileme.com user since it’s upgrade from .mac. The main reason that I signed up was because of the push feature for calendar and contacts to my iPod Touch. I manage a team of six people, called my family, and having all of the calendars stay in sync with my computer automatically was a big plus for me.

But aside from the sync feature, I wasn’t using many of the other features that me.com had to offer.

I was toying with the idea of starting a family website. Since I am a private person, I didn’t like the idea of plastering the web with my family’s pictures and details of their daily happenings. I discovered that publishing a site using iWeb that is hosted at MobileMe had a password protection feature. I was quite tempted by the array of fancy templates and decided to give it a go.

I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed. Let me just say that I am running iLife ‘09 so you know where I am coming from.

Building a web page was easy enough. The drag and drop feature for pictures and videos was easy to use. But arranging items on a preset template was harder. Things would overlap and creating more space for my new objects was not intuitive. I did scan the manual but did not really pore over it.

I liked that I built the pages on my computer and uploaded them to the web. This meant that even if I cancelled my MobileMe. com service – the pages that I created in iWeb would still exist on my computer and not disappear. After all a family website is a chronicle, a history or diary of our life – and that is precious.

I think I would have stuck with it – but for the fact that the iWeb pages loaded very slowly on other people’s computers. Grandpa, for instance, uses DSL and Windows. He could not get the site to load correctly and videos took up to 15 minutes to load completely. Not very effective – since most people would click away long before the process was complete.

The only explanation for this slow load time that I could find is that iWeb pages are very graphic intensive and the underlying code is not web optimized. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to spend my time building a wonderful website that no one would be able to read.

I have since started the family website using Blogger. Blogger has a permissions feature that lets me list the emails of people that I want to access the site. However, the people should really have a gmail address so they can access the site when they are signed into their gmail account. This is harder than the iWeb process of assigning a username and password to the site itself. And it puts a burden on my relatives to sign up for a gmail account that they may not want.

Finally, now Blogger will own my site. All the pages are stored on the web – not on my computer. If they decide to shut my site down then bye, bye hard work. Or if I don’t use my account for a certain amount of time – then my site will disappear as well.

I didn’t look into WordPress.com as an alternative. But I know that it is difficult to password protect an entire site using self hosted WordPress.org.

I haven’t found an ideal solution. But if you have one – I would love to hear about it in the comments.