Learning iWeb

For one of my auxiliary tasks, I will have to create a website for my newspaper, and to do this I had to gain knowledge and experience of a piece of software which will allow me to create it. Due to the nature of the equipment we have in college (Apple Macs), we have the iWeb software available to us in all lessons, and during extra-curricular time as well. Because of these factors, I chose iWeb over Adobe Dreamweaver, which I actually had some practice in from GCSE ICT. Also, I felt that I could use iWeb to create a more professional standard product, both using the layouts suggested inside the program and the more sophisticated tools that iWeb offered. I took to iWeb for some creative experimentation, basing my ideas on the days news, as reported by The Guardian (above).

Having looked at some of the styles iWeb offered, I found the best one that would suit a newspaper style website. I chose the 'blog' template, which looked as though it fitted my genre. Others I had looked at looked more like they should be for personal blogs or websites, such as these

The layout I decided to use was a blog layout presumably aimed at people using it for holiday entries, however it was perfect for my practice using the product. Taking into consideration it was just a practice session, with the aid of my teachers, peers and internet guides, I played around with what I had, adding in satirical stories as well as those I had found from the internet. I learnt how to add in text properly, using the 'new blog' feature, how to delete items that I didn't want, change text that was there, insert my own images, and had a better idea of how the layouts worked on iWeb as they differ greatly from any Adobe or Microsoft product I had ever used. One thing I found difficult was that the built in layouts were restricting in that I could not change the colours of the backgrounds or alter the layout from its set position. Despite this, I was happy with what I had achieved, and I now feel in a better position for moving onto actually creating my website; safe in the knowledge I can make a product that looks good and is efficient in a small amount of time.
The most valuable lesson I had learnt from my experience was the aspect of saving my document, as on College Macs, you need to find a 'domain' file once you have saved it in order to enable editing next time around, however I shut down my computer without thinking and the file was lost. Thankfully I was not half way through working on my final piece!