New Web Site

Eli

Logician
Hey All,

For those interested, check out my web site. It's been totally redesigned from the ground up. It has links to all of my Electronic Musician articles, and Groove 3 videos.

There's also a link at the bottom of the articles page to the screen cast I did on creative Flex editing for Electronic Musician a while back.

And of course there is some music :)

http://www.elikrantzberg.com
 
And of course there is some music :)

http://www.elikrantzberg.com

Looks great very nice straightforward navigation and great tracks.

My only criticism is I would open the mp3 links in a new window (or better, in a player. Some browsers will download that kind of link and I find that annoying).

The problem is its easy to play a track, then close the window to get back to the site and the whole site has closed.
 
Hi Pete (an Orren)

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I don't like the mp3 in the same window function either. I'm using iWeb, and, great as it is, it does "handcuff" you when it comes to things like this.

Does anyone happen to know how to set a linked audio file to open to a new page in iWeb 09? I don't think it's possible without some under the hood tinkering.
 
It looks really nice, but I would consider having it converted this site to Wordpress. It will give you a lot of control that you do not have in iWeb.
 
Does anyone happen to know how to set a linked audio file to open to a new page in iWeb 09? I don't think it's possible without some under the hood tinkering.

Unfortunately, I had an iWeb site years ago, and I moved to Wordpress for www.orrenmerton.com for similar reasons. iWeb is great for making pretty sites from their templates, but it's not designed for users who want anything other than what Apple gives you. My wife is actually adept to a degree with CSS and HTML and all that and she went into my iWeb site back in the day, but the problem is, even if you do some of that "under the hood" tinkering, any update with iWeb that affected the templates killed the tinkering, and needed to be redone.

I think Jay's suggestion of Wordpress is a great one. I use it for orrenmerton.com, and while emberafter.com is a combination of custom coded HTML pages (the wife again) and Wordpress blogs, for my imminent release, there is going to be a site redesign to a completely Wordpress solution. The webcomic my wife and I do, Karma Kat and Dogma, is also a Wordpress site, with a theme called "ComicPress."

You may think of Wordpress as "just for blogging" but it's a true "content management system" (CMS) these days. Believe it or not, iWeb is also a CMS, just a more object-oriented one. But like iWeb, Wordpress lets you design static pages, not just blog pages. On orrenmerton.com for example, you'll notice the Home page is not the blog, but a static welcome page.

As a CMS, Wordpress has many advantages over iWeb:
• It's a completely web-based solution. So you can add content from your iOS device (either through the free Wordpress app or my current favorite, BlogPress), any web browser on any computer, etc. With iWeb, you can only make changes from the install of iWeb you initially used to create your page.

• It offers plug-ins, so you can add any sort of "widget" you want. Media players, statistic plug-ins, etc. For example, I get complete stats (courtesy of a free plug-in and Google Analytics) of who comes to my site, where they come from, what keywords are being used to find my site, and so on. I also have a plug-in that automatically builds pages for me, automatically sends podcasts to iTunes, has links to all my social media, and so on. iWeb doesn't offer any of this.

• iWeb has limitations based on where it is being hosted. For example, if you have a blog, the "add comments" feature only works if me.com is your host-if you have a personal host, the comments function doesn't work. So whereas you can take your Wordpress install anywhere you go if you want to change providers, etc. and lose nothing, with iWeb, you're going to lose functionality if you don't go with me.com.

If you're thinking that you don't want to get into learning how to install Wordpress into a host account and all that jazz, you can easily find hosts that offer a "one-click install" for Wordpress. That is exactly what it sounds like-Wordpress is pre-installed into your hosting account, and you just click the button to make it active. So you don't have to upload Wordpress and set up the MySQL database (which is really easy). In fact, I just did a search for "wordpress one click hosting" to make sure I wasn't leading you on a wild goose chase, and it came up with lots of options.

If even that sounds daunting, you can sign up for an account on Wordpress.com. For free, you can get an account that would look like "eli.wordpress.com" but you can have Wordpress host your own domain for $12-$17/year-hardly an astronomic expense. Then wordpress.com is in control of stopping spam and giving you site statistics and updating the wordpress installation and all of that good stuff, and all you do is add content.

Of course, having just put together your iWeb pages, you may not be very excited about starting with a new theme and a new CMS. :) But having used iWeb myself for many months from 2008-2009 (both iWeb '08 and iWeb '09), I can tell you, it's extremely limited, and you're going to end up very disappointed with it. Maybe not tomorrow, or next week, but as you add more music, want to add more details, want to add a picture from your iOS device...you'll get frustrated. (I wouldn't have thought so, but I do lots of blogging from my phone!). Really, iWeb is great for teens who just want to put up a "look at me and my rad vacation!" style of site, or for people or even businesses that want pretty but totally static sites that have no real media, just images, maybe a map to the location and an email link. But I'd never recommend it as a CMS.

Orren
 
Alternatively, I have a guy who is quire reasonably priced who will do it for you. He did a great job on mine IMHO.
 
Thanks for the input guys. I looked briefly at Wordpress. It does look more fully functioning than iWeb. But I also use my hosting account (lunarpages.com) as an ftp server when I need to upload/download large files for clients, etc. Does wordpress hosting offer any kind of file storage like this?

And yeah Orren, I don't think I want to go to the trouble of changing over right now. Maybe in a year or so when I'm unhappy with my site again :) But it is good to know about wordrpess. So, thanks. And I will continue to look at it and try and get a feel for how it works slowly.
 
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