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With MobileMe, users were able to password protect their entire iWeb websites. Now that MobileMe is being discontinued, users need to find a new option for password protecting their sites. One of the biggest drawbacks to MobileMe’s password protection is that users must password protect the entire site, and not just individual pages. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can password protect individual pages on your site. This demonstration uses RAGE Web Hosting so be sure you have your cPanel username and password handy.

If you have yet to sign up to RAGE Web Hosting, you can do so now and follow along with the tutorial. If you have any questions, please feel free to let us know.

Video Transcript:

If you have a subscription to MobileMe, you are able to password protect your entire iWeb website. You weren’t able to password protect individual pages, but rather the entire website would need to be password protected. But now that MobileMe is being discontinued, this feature will no longer be an option for users. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how you can password protect individual pages on your website, and even create multiple usernames and passwords for those pages.

In order to do this and follow along with the tutorial, your website must be hosted with RAGE Web Hosting. You can sign up for hosting at ragesw.com

Another few restrictions to this that I want to mention is that we’re going to be creating a new page, which means that if you already have your page created, you will either need to re-create it, or copy and paste the content over to the new page. That is going to depend on the current setup of your page, but I have a feeling most of you will be copy and paste the content.

Another restriction is that this won’t work as well with a blog, or a podcast page.

One last restriction that I will mention is that we’re going to need to create links to the password protected page as opposed to having it being automatically placed in our navigation menu like other iWeb pages.

Okay so now that we’ve discussed those, let’s get right to it. First open up your website in iWeb. Click on the Add Page button, and select the My Albums page from the White website template. The default name for this page will by My Albums, but let’s rename it to something different. You can name it whatever you want, but I am going to name it login. This name will appear in the URL so make sure whatever you choose, you don’t mind other people seeing it.

The next thing we’ll do, is disable almost everything on this page. Our goal is to have this page be a blank white page. So you can highlight everything on the page, and hit the delete key. You will notice some things disappear while others remain.

The next thing we’ll need to do is click on the Inspector button and click on the Photos tab. Then deselect the option to Allow visitors to subscribe. This will get rid of the Subscribe button. Then with the Inspector window still open, click on the page tab and deselect the options to Include page in navigation menu, as well as Display navigation menu. This will take this page out of your main navigation menu, and also take away the navigation menu from this page which is exactly what we want.

In the end, all that you should see is the empty photo album that says Drag Albums here. If you see more than this, then you may have done something incorrectly.

Our next step is to add the page that will be password protected. Click on the Add Page button, and select Movie. You can choose this page from any of the templates. Make sure that this page is located below and slightly to the right of the page we just modified before. It should look like mine. This indicates that this page is going to be in my login page’s directory.

You can name this page whatever you want as well. This is the page that users will access once they type in the username and password you have provided the with.

We’re almost done in iWeb. So far, we’ve made our blank page, and our page that will be password protected. But now, how will our users know where to login? This is completely optional, but we can now make a login link. To do this, click on the Text Box button and type in some anchor text for your login link. Next, highlight the text and click on the Inspector button. Then click on the Link tab, and select Enable as hyperlink. Then select One of my pages from the drop down menu, and select your password protected page. Note, this is not the blank page, which for me is called login, but is the page beneath the login page which is called sign-in. Now I’ll just place the text box where I want it to go on my site, and then I will copy the text box. I am copying it because I want to place it on every page on my site. To do this, I am just going to click on each page and paste the text box.

Now we’re done with iWeb and onto our last step, which is to make the Login directory password protected.

When you signed up with RAGE Web Hosting, you were given access to what is known as cPanel. When you have logged into cPanel, scroll down to where it says Security and click on Password Protect Directories. In the pop up window, leave Web Root as the selected option, and click the Go button. You should now see various files and folders. My website is called Jeremy’s Golf Shop so I will click on the tiny folder image right next to that. If you don’t have a folder for your website, you can skip this step and continue with us on the next step.

Once in the folder, we will see all of the folders associated with our websites. Now we must click on the folder name that we want to make password protected. So we know I want to password protect the Login page so I will click on it.

To enable the password protection, check the box that reads Password protect this directory. Then give the protected directory a name and click Save. If you ever want to remove the password protection from this page, just uncheck the option to password protect the directory.

Now we can create usernames and passwords by filling out the fields in the Create User section. You can create multiple usernames and passwords that you can give out to different individuals or organizations. When you are done creating your users, click on the Add/Modify authorized user button. We can now visit our websites and test the password protection.

Click on the link for the page that you password protected, and a popup window prompting a username and password should appear. Type in a correct username and password, and you can now access that page. If you click cancel, you will be told that you are not authorized to view the page.