As MobileMe is being discontinued in less than 2 weeks, many users are discovering that publishing their website to an FTP server sometimes produces cryptic errors that prevent your website from being published.
This is actually a bug in iWeb, and in most FTP publishing tools. Fortunately we have fixed this publishing bug and included it in our newest release of iWeb SEO Tool.
Now you can make sure your website lives on once MobileMe goes away on June 30th.
Plus, iWeb SEO Tool is free for users who have signed up to our iWeb Web Hosting for a year or more. Make sure your iWeb sites work perfectly with our iWeb Web Hosting and iWeb SEO Tool.
As users continue to migrate from MobileMe to iCloud, there is still the question of what services will be lost.
As we can see from this image which comes from Apple’s MobileMe transition page, the three items that are not available in iCloud are iWeb publishing, Galleries, and iDisk.
By utilizing RAGE Web Hosting, you can actually continue with these three features. Let’s discuss each of these features, and how you can continue to utilize them.
iWeb Publishing
A common mistake made by many iWeb users is thinking that because MobileMe is being discontinued, it means they can no longer use iWeb. This couldn’t be further from the truth. You will still be able to use iWeb to build your website for the foreseeable future. As a matter of fact, it is recommended that you continue to do so. There is no reason right now for there to be any panic about not being able to use iWeb.
So what do you need to do in order to continue using iWeb? Well, since MobileMe took care of your publishing before, all you need to do now is find a new place to publish your website to. What this entails is signing up for hosting with a web host such as RAGE Web Hosting.
After you have signed up for your account, all you need to do is copy and paste your FTP login details. So instead of publishing to MobileMe from iWeb, you will simply publish to FTP instead, and the information you will use to publish to FTP will be given to you in an email that you will be able to just copy and paste. This only needs to be done once. After the first time, you will be able to click the Publish button like you normally would when updating your site on a frequent basis.
Galleries
MobileMe users who use the gallery feature can still have galleries by following these steps:
First, use iPhoto to create a photo album. When the album is complete, it will show up in the media section of iWeb. Then create an albums page, and simply drag and drop the photo album from the media section over to the albums page in iWeb.
iDisk
When you sign up for web hosting, you are also given web space to store files of your choice. In order to do this, you can use a free FTP client such as CyberDuck which will allow you to easily drag and drop items from your hard drive onto your server in the cloud.
To summarize, iWeb users can continue using iWeb as they did in the past. Sign up for RAGE Web Hosting today and let us help you with the transfer from MobileMe to our hosting.
After switching from MobileMe to a real web hosting service many users are finding that their web.me.com website is still appearing in Google, and often higher than their new website.
This happens because your web.me.com website has been around longer and your new website has the exact same content. Google is not likely to show two websites with the exact same content so you need to make sure you do this as quickly as possible once you move to a real web hosting service.
1) The first thing you are going to want to do is create an XML Sitemap for your new website. You can do this very easily with Sitemap Automator. Follow the instructions for publishing and verifying your website with Google Webmaster Tools (Hint: We have video tutorials on the above page that explains how to do this step by step.)
2) Delete the content from your web.me.com website. You can do this by mounting your iDisk in the Finder (or longing in to your iDisk at http://www.me.com) and going to the Web/Sites/ directory. Delete the contents in this directory.
2a) Advanced: Instead of deleting your content in step 2, you can also use a meta refresh with a refresh rate of 0 to redirect traffic from your web.me.com website to your new website. If you have set up your new website with our Web Hosting services we can help you with this. Otherwise you will need to contact your web hosting company.
3) The changes will not be reflected immediately. If you did step 2 above and you do a search for your website the web.me.com address will still appear in search results for about a week but will go to a non-existing page. If you did step 2a above your web.me.com page will still appear in search engines but will redirect to your new website. Eventually your new site will start to rank higher than your web.me.com page and your web.me.com page will be removed from Google’s search results.
4) Bonus: If you want to completely remove your web.me.com website from Google and other search engines as quickly as possible you need to create a robots.txt files that disallows search engines from indexing your website. To do this create a plain text file called robots.txt and enter the following code exactly as shown below in it;
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Then put this robots.txt file on your iDisk in the Web/Sites/ directory. Again, if you are using our web hosting services we can do this for you. Otherwise you will need to contact your current web hosting provider.
That’s it for moving your iWeb website from MobileMe to a real web hosting service. Don’t worry, even though Apple has discontinued MobileMe, iWeb will continue to work for a long time as long as you have it installed on your computer. If you are looking to optimize your iWeb site for Google and other search engines, take a look at our iWeb search engine optimization training courses.
SEIntelligence, our powerful all-in-one search engine optimization application is much more powerful than iWeb SEO Tool, and can be the difference maker for a user trying to rank higher in search engines. With direct instructions on how to optimize your website, SEIntelligence makes it easy for any user to optimize their website. In the tutorial below, we will give you a quick tour of SEIntelligence and show you how it works and how it can help you. As noted in the video, SEIntelligence would replace iWeb SEO Tool, so you would not need to use both iWeb SEO Tool and SEIntelligence, just SEIntelligence.
Video Transcript:
A lot of you are using iWeb SEO Tool to optimize your iWeb site for search engines, but I wanted to show you our newest and most powerful way of optimizing an iWeb site. Some of you have probably already heard of it, but for those who haven’t, SEIntelligence is our latest SEO application, that is much more powerful than iWeb SEO Tool and works great with iWeb sites.
So for this video I just wanted to give you a quick tour of SEIntelligence and show you what you can expect to do with this powerful application.
SEIntelligence will allow me to load my website into the application. In this case, I already have a site loaded in, so I will just click on this existing profile and my iWeb site will load here in SEIntelligence.
You will notice that as I click on one of my website pages with a .html extension, the meta keywords will show up right here. These meta keywords are the keywords that I choose to target for my website. Based on these keywords, I am going to perform a competitive analysis, which will show me the top 10 ranking websites for a particular keyword that I am choosing. So in this case, I am going to search for Men’s Drivers in Google.
When the results appear, I will see the top 10 ranking websites, along with a lot of information about those websites.
What SEIntelligence is now doing, is analyzing my website, and comparing it to these top 10 websites, and providing me with feedback based on this analysis.
For example, if we click on the Title tab, we can see the suggestions SEIntelligence is giving me for my title based on what I currently have, and what the top 10 ranking websites are doing. Now I can change my title tag and when I click the Apply button, these suggestions will change based on what I just typed in.
You can repeat this for all of the tabs at the top. Then you can publish your website straight from SEIntelligence to your server.
So that is my quick introduction to SEIntelligence. It’s an extremely powerful SEO application and many users are extremely pleased with the results they have achieved by utilizing it. SEIntelligence would replace iWeb SEO Tool, so you would only need to optimize your site in SEIntelligence and not both iWeb SEO Tool and SEIntelligence.
SEIntelligence also comes with free video tutorials to teach you how to use the application properly so I encourage everyone to take advantage of them.
If you use both iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher, you might wonder what the preferred method of using both of these applications is. While there is no correct answer, we suggest that users optimize their site with iWeb SEO Tool, and then publish the site to a local folder and then optimize with WebCrusher. You would then publish your website to your server from WebCrusher’s built-in FTP client.
Here is a visualization of our recommended method for using both iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher.
Video Transcript:
If you use iWeb SEO Tool and WebCrusher, here is our recommended method for using both of these products.
First, load your website in iWeb SEO Tool, and make any necessary chances, or press the Re-Apply Saved Tags button. Then publish the site to a local folder on your hard drive by clicking on the publish button, followed by selecting the Publish to Folder tab. When you click on the Next button, the Finder window should appear with your website folder highlighted.
Drag and drop that Folder onto WebCrusher’s canvas. Click the Go button to optimize the site, and when the optimization is complete, click on the Export button, and publish the site to your server via WebCrusher’s built-in FTP client.
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.
Adding header tags to an iWeb site has never been easier. Follow the instructions carefully in this video tutorial to learn how you can properly add header tags to your iWeb website.
Video Transcript:
Being introduced for the first time ever, iWeb users will now be able to add header tags to their websites, without having to hand code it in the HTML. Header tags are another way for you to demonstrate to search engines which keywords are important on your page.
So what is a header tag, and how do we make one?
Basically, a header tag is a block of text that can be compared to a title, or a headline for a larger body of text. Think of a newspaper article. There is a headline which indicates what the entire article is about. Then there is a subheading which gives a bit more insight into the article.
Our websites are similar to the structure of a newspaper article. A headline can contain our primary key term for each page, and an optional subheading can contain our secondary key term for each page.
In HTML, there are six headers that you can use. Those headers are h1 through h6. I am only going to demonstrate adding an h1 header since that is what most of you will be doing. If you want to add an h2 as well, then feel free to do so. h1 and h2 are the most popular headers, so use those if you have room on your site. Trying to add all headers to your site is not generally a good idea, unless your site is structured in a way that makes sense to do so. Also, the rule of thumb is to only have one h1 per page.
So to do this in iWeb, simply click on the Text Box button, and type in this code you see here.
The area where I wrote ‘This is my header tag’ is where you should type in your header tag. The HTML here should look identical to mine. But the text part should contain your header tag which could be anything you want it to be. I recommend putting the main key-term you are targeting for this specific page.
Before we move on to the next step, I want to point out that you can also change the font of this text like you normally would with any text, by highlighting the text and clicking on the Fonts button.
Now when you publish your site to a local folder, and load the site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must check the box to Convert header tags in text boxes to HTML code, and then press the Apply To Entire Site button. What this will do is strip the HTML code from the site, so that only the actual text is being shown. Remember, your header tag should be visible on your site. If you can’t see it, or if you still see the HTML code, it means you did not do this process correctly, and you will need to try again.
Some of you can expect to run into some issues when adding header tags. For example, you will notice that the header tag does not always end up in the same place online as it did in iWeb. This is normal. You may need to play around with it a bit until you find the right spot. To make things easier on yourself, try not to place the header too close other items on your page. This will leave you with a bit of a buffer for when the header ends up in a slightly different location.
A lot of you have been asking how to add a contact us form to your site in iWeb. Here is a quick tutorial showing you how to easily add a form to your site. Don’t forget to also use MailShoot to add a mailing list signup form to your site in iWeb.
Video Transcript:
You can easily add a simple contact us form to your iWeb website. First go to foxyform.com
In the Step 1 settings section, select the fields that you would like to appear on your form. A standard form will have Name, and E-mail. You can choose to add some others such as subject and phone number, but I recommend keeping the total fields to a minimum.
In step 2 Advanced settings, here is where you can change the way the form looks. I won’t go into detail on this section, but I do encourage you to play around with this section if you want to customize your form a bit.
Then enter your e-mail address. This is the e-mail address where you will receive the messages from the people who type something into the form on your website.
At the bottom, you can see a preview of what your form looks like.
Then press the Create Formular button. Highlight the HTML code and copy it.
Then open up your site in iWeb. Click on the Add Page button, find your theme and add a blank page. Delete any extra text that comes on the blank document.
Then add an HTML snippet to this blank page, and paste the code you just copied. You now have a contact form on your website. If you want to add this form to any other page on your site, or add it in any different way shape or form, feel free to experiment.
For more helpful iWeb tips and tricks, be sure to subscribe and visit our website.
Many of our customers use Apple’s website building program called iWeb. We speak to many of these users on a daily basis, and a very common thing we hear from them is “I am brand new to all of this, where do I begin? How can I use your company to make my life easier?”
If this sounds like you, then read the remainder of this article. We will cover the basics of our products/services and how each of them can really benefit you. The level of difficulty for all of our software is low. We have training videos for absolutely everything, so no need to worry about being in over your head.
Strongly Recommended
1. So someone has told you that you need to change your title tag. Not sure what that is? Our FREE SEO For iWeb Walkthrough Video Course will teach you everything you need to know about making your iWeb site more search engine friendly.
2. Google can’t find your site? This is not surprising. Use Sitemap Automator to get your site listed in all major search engines.
3. Have you noticed that your iWeb site loads slow? Your customers have noticed too! Slow loading sites means users clicking the back button. Use WebCrusher to drastically improve your website’s loading time.
6. Facebook is one of the most visited websites in the world. Connecting with your customers on Facebook is a no brainer. Use MapDesign to create a custom Facebook page.
More Advanced Users
Want the most powerful SEO software we offer? Use SEIntelligence to compare your site to your competition, and use the suggestions made to improve your website all in one spot. (Warning: Could result in high rankings!)
Let’s Not Forget Hosting
Here at RAGE Software, we pride ourselves on being your businesses one-stop-shop for everything your website needs. We encourage all iWeb users to switch to our web hosting. We also take pride in our excellent customer service and exceptional iWeb knowledge – a feat no other web hosting company claims to have. Your website is important to you, and you are important to us. When you switch to our web hosting, you will not be disappointed.
We hope this article gives you a better understanding of what we do, and how we are able to help your website succeed. If you have any inquirers please don’t hesitate to e-mail us.
There was, yet another, update to the Facebook Developers like button page, which has caused some confusion for iWeb users trying to put the Like button on their site. Here is an updated video to outline what user’s should now do in order to add the button. Note at the end where the button is not visible on the screen. Many of you can expect to see the same, which may make it a bit tricky to add the button.
Twitter
Facebook
Youtube
Blog RSS