Apple iWeb

» see apple.com/ilife/iweb as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

iweb was a mac thing made for mac users who paid apple for hosting. that was a small slice of the world from where i was sitting. through the late 2000s i was on windows in ankara, building things in notepad and uploading via filezilla. iweb did not exist as a temptation for me, only as a recognizable look that showed up on the open web sometimes.

steve jobs announced iweb at macworld on january 10, 2006, as the new fifth pillar of ilife. it was wysiwyg in the apple sense: you picked a template, then dragged photos in from iphoto and dropped a youtube widget or an itunes album link onto the page. the publish button assumed you had a.mac account, later mobileme, and by default it pushed your site to a folder on your idisk. you could ftp to a third-party host instead, but the path of least resistance was to pay apple.

iweb stopped getting major updates after iweb '09. version 3.0.4 in july 2011 was a maintenance release. by then apple had already announced icloud and quietly admitted that the new service had no replacement for hosted websites. mobileme shut on june 30, 2012, and every iweb site that lived on a me.com or mac.com address disappeared with it. apple offered a migration window but nothing in icloud to migrate to.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

iweb's selling point was the integration. iphoto was already where mac users kept their photos. itunes was where they kept their music. iweb let you drag from one into a webpage without thinking about html or filenames. for a non-technical user it was the easiest path from "i have stuff on my mac" to "i have a website."

the templates had a strong house style. heavy drop shadows over rounded corners, with helvetica neue title bars. you could tell an iweb site from across the room. that aesthetic ages in interesting ways now. it looks like the moment between blog templates and squarespace, frozen in apple's idea of what a personal page should look like.

~ the slide ~

iweb generated heavy html. it leaned on absolute positioning and prerendered images for things that should have been css. the output was slow to load and almost impossible to edit by hand. when iphone safari became the way most people checked links, iweb pages did not respond at all. apple never shipped a fix. the product had been frozen.

the bigger problem was that apple lost interest in mobileme as a hosting service. the company was pivoting to icloud, and icloud was a sync service, not a hosting service. there was no clean place for iweb to publish to anymore. shipping a new version would have meant rewriting both the app and the back-end story, and apple decided to do neither.

~ what got buried with it ~

the migration window came and went. people who had built family pages or school portfolios on me.com woke up on july 1, 2012 to broken links. some had backups. many didn't, because iweb's "publish" had felt like saving, and the local domain file was a single bundle most users never thought to copy off the laptop.

copies of those sites still surface in the wayback machine. a recognizable house style, frozen in 2010 or 2011, one last update before the publish button stopped doing anything.

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