Many Mac Users are very eager to start a blog with very little hassle.

There are a few hurdles for most people to start their blogs;

1. Technical hurdles in setting up a website
2. Installing a blogging platform such as WordPress
3. Designing your website and learning HTML/CSS
4. Making sure that your blog does not get hacked

If you’re looking to start a blog, this article is for you if;

1. You don’t want to bother with technical skills or coding
2. You want to have your own design (or pick a nice existing design)
3. You don’t want to worry about your blog getting hacked!

WordPress is the common recommendation for blogging because it is extremely robust, You can do a lot with it.

But if you don’t know HTML/CSS/Javascript you will not be able to create your own, fully customized design.

It also takes some technical skills to set up and requires constant ongoing maintenance including; updating WordPress, updating plugins, updating themes and preventing hacking. WordPress sites get hacked all the time!

So what’s the best option to blogging on the Mac that covers all the criteria discussed above?

EverWeb, is by far the easiest blogging tool that gives you control over your website design, does not require ANY technical skills, coding or even setting up a web host.

With EverWeb you can simply sign up to one of the EverWeb + Hosting plans and you’re ready to go.

You use EverWeb like any other software you download on your Mac such as Apple Pages, Mail, Keynote or any other app you have on your computer. Double click it and you’re ready to go.

Learn how you can add anchor links to your website in EverWeb. You can add a quick jump anchor link, or add a smooth scrolling anchor link using some simple code (copying and pasting). You can also purchase third-party widgets that will allow you to add these smooth scrolling links very easily.

EverWeb is a great option for those looking to create a website for their small business.

EverWeb users can add a bit of flare to their website with a new widget recently released by everwebcodebox.com

A full width resize on scroll header widget was recently released allowing EverWeb users to improve the look of their websites. Though the widget is powerful and may take about 10 minutes to get the hang of, any user should be able to add this feature to their website.

Here is a video tutorial showing an example of how to add this resize header to a site.

Why is this good?
In an old fashioned world of web design, we would create a website with a centred layout and some sort of browser background image (or color). As the browser window expands, we see more and more of the background image or color. The background image or color is typically not fluid with the main design of the website where the users attention is usually focused.

How do you make a site full width?
This is easily done by making a shape or object or widget full width via the Full Width check box on the metrics tab. See the video tutorial below for a visualization on how this is done.

For those of you who want to create an e-commerce store on your website so you can sell your products right off your EverWeb website, PayPal is the best choice. It’s free and easy to setup. You do not need to get approved to become a merchant, which can sometimes take a long time.

PayPal allows you to sell individual items using a buy now button, or you can use add to cart buttons which will allow your website visitors to add items to their shopping carts and continue to shop on your site. This is very useful when you have multiple items on your website that you want to sell.

*EverWeb is a drag and drop website builder that allows you to make your own website. It is comparable to Apple’s old drag and drop website builder iWeb. iWeb was discontinued several years ago, leaving thousands of faithful users worrying about the future of their websites.

A favorite icon, also known as a favicon is the small little image you see on many different websites. It is located in the address bar, usually to the left of the website’s URL.

Adding a favicon in Sandvox is relatively simple. First, press the inspector button, and then press the site tab, followed up by the media tab.

You will see the word Favicon in this section. To the right of it, press the browse button, and locate the image that you want to use for your favicon. Select it, and the next time you publish your website, your favicon will appear in the address bar.

When iWeb users create and publish their site, there are so many SEO elements that have been ignored, making it almost impossible for anyone to find their site via search engines. This is not the iWeb users fault. Out of the box, yes iWeb is not very helpful for SEO. This is because things such as title tags, header tags, alternative text, and even basic content on a page is not a dominant on an iWeb site as opposed to a site made in a regular HTML editor.

But the problem is easy to fix! But just like you had to learn how to use iWeb, you are going to need to learn a few things about SEO.

First off, let me quickly explain what SEO is for those of you who might not be entirely sure. SEO is basically a process we do, and continue to perform, in order to get our sites ranking higher in search engines. Google has over 2 billion searches performed each day. We all want a piece of that pie.

Continuing with the explanation of what SEO is leads me to explaining the different types of optimizations that people can make to their site. The first optimization is the on-page optimizations. This consists of things we CAN control on our own. These are the actual changes we make to our sites so that our keywords can be better read by search engines, and even our website visitors. The second optimization is off-page optimizations. This consists of the promotion we do for our site in order to attract visitors, and gain reputation for our website. The better our site’s reputations, the higher we’ll be placed in search engines.

Now let’s head back to you guys. How can you accomplish this for your iWeb sites. Well, the first thing you need to address is your on-page optimizations. iWeb makes it a bit tricky to optimize a few things, such as title tags, alternative text, and meta information such as keywords, and description (note: meta keywords and description don’t influence our rankings, but are still very important for other reasons.)

Luckily for iWeb users, as most my website visitors already know, you can easily add those optimizations mentioned above via a free third-party tool called iWeb SEO Tool by RAGE Software.  This tool will help you easily implement your title tags, meta tags, alt text, and analytics codes. Be sure to watch my tutorial on how to use iWeb SEO Tool.

There are a few more things you can do to your site in order to make it more search engine friendly. Both on-page and off-page, there are so many things to learn about that can help your rankings. A search on Google will help you find what you are looking for, or if you are the type that prefers to have direct instructions in front of you, then I would suggest watching RAGE’s SEO Video which will show you a couple dozen things you can do to your iWeb sites, on-page and off-page to better help your SEO efforts.

So to sum up, iWeb is not bad for SEO – it’s just a bit trickier. Don’t be discouraged by people who tell you not to bother with iWeb because no one will be able to find your site. All you need is knowledge on the matter and you will see that in no time, your site will start soaring above others.

This tutorial will show you how to properly publish your iWeb site, so that you can avoid having your website URL be longer than necessary.

If you use iWeb, you already know that when you type in your website’s URL, once you are taken to your page, the URL in the address bar will forward to your domain name, followed by the site name that you gave in iWeb while publishing, followed by your page’s file name.  This URL you see here is just an example of what this might look like.

What we are going to be doing in this video, is reduce the length of the URL by getting rid of the site name so that the URL goes from looking like this, to looking like this. I will not be teaching you how to have the domain read just www.yourdomain.com. The reason for this is because the easiest way of actually doing this to an iWeb site would be to turn on what is called domain masking.

I will quickly tell you what domain masking is, and why you don’t want to use it for your website. Domain Masking is basically hiding the name of your site and replacing it with something else. As an example, notice how when I click to various pages on this site, the URL in the address bar stays the same. The reason why domain masking is not recommended, is because it makes other pages on your website unrecognizable by search engines and it makes it impossible for your users to bookmark an individual page on your site.

Now that we have a good understanding of the URL structure with iWeb sites, let’s get right into reducing the length of our URL’s. The first thing I want you to know is that you will be required to have a third-party FTP tool to publish your site. This means that we will no longer be publishing our websites directly from iWeb.

I recommend using Cyberduck or iWeb SEO Tool which are both available for free. Cyberduck is a basic FTP client which allows you to transfer files from your local hard drive to your web-space and vice cersa. iWeb SEO Tool is a great application for iWeb users to optimize their sites for search engines, AND it also includes a built in FTP client.  I’m going to be using iWeb SEO Tool in this demonstration, because I want to show how this method of reducing the length of our URL’s applies to people who use iWeb SEO Tool as well.

So the first thing we are going to do, is publish our website to a local folder in iWeb. It will be easiest for you if you create a new folder and publish your site to this new folder. You will need to remember where you created this new folder on your hard drive. I am going to call my new folder My iWeb SIte. While the site is publishing, I want you to take note of my Site Name, Photos By Matt which can be seen here…and here. Keep this in mind for later in the tutorial.

When our sites have finished publishing, go ahead and open the folder where you just published your site to. You should notice that there are three things inside this folder. There is an index.html file, a file with a long name that has the word ‘assets’ at the front, and finally a folder with your Site Name on it. Inside this folder, is where all of our website files are. The reason we get long URL’s is because we publish all three of these files.

Here is how we will fix this. In iWeb SEO Tool, when I press the Open Website button, I will first locate the folder that I just created. Many people will select this folder and choose to load the entire folder. This is how we end up with those long URLs. Instead, I will select this folder, and then locate the folder inside of it that contains the Site Name for my website, which is Photos By Matt which, we took note of earlier.

When we publish this to our FTP account, our site will now not have the site name in the URL.

If you wanted to publish to an FTP client such as Cyberduck,  make sure that you do not just upload the folder with your Site Name on it, but that you select all of the contents of the folder and upload them directly to your FTP.

Don’t forget to check out the iWeb SEO video walkthrough tutorial to learn how to get your site ranked higher in search engines.

This video is for those of you who publish your iWeb site using MobileMe, have a blog on your site, and want to optimize your site using iWeb SEO Tool. I will repeat that once more… if you publish your iWeb site to MobileMe, have a blog, and wish to use iWeb SEO Tool,  you must follow these simples instructions so that the commenting feature on your blog does not become disabled.

The first thing you must remember to do, is publish your site to your iDisk directly from iWeb.

Once your site is published, you are ready to begin your optimization using iWeb SEO Tool.

Make sure you load your site using the Load iDisk Sites button.

The preferences in iWeb SEO Tool are set to not allow a page file that contains the word ‘blog’ to be optimized. The reason for this is that if a file of this kind is optimized, it will compromise the file and cause the blog commenting feature to not function. In some cases, the blog files may not contain the word ‘blog’ in them. This would be due to the user naming these files something different. If that is the case, you can change the preferences so that the tool does not optimize the files for your blog. So let’s say for example that you change the name of this file here from Blog to Journal. When optimizing your site in iWeb SEO Tool, you must change the preferences so that the tool is set to not optimize files that contain the word Journal.

Once you have optimized all of your pages, you do not need to publish your site to your MobileMe account within the tool. Since you are logged in, and have loaded your site directly from your iDisk, the changes you make in iWeb SEO Tool will be reflected immediately after you press the apply button.

In this video, I’m going to give an important tip to iWeb users who use RAGE Software’s iWeb SEO tool. If you are unfamiliar with the tool, there is also a video available explaining what it does and how to use it.

After using iWeb SEO Tool and Publishing your changes for the first time, you are not completely done with the tool, unless you never update your site.

If you do, however, update your site, as many users do on a frequent basis, it is important to know that the changes you made to your Title Tags, meta tags and alternative text, will be overwritten when you update your site, and republish it in iWeb.  Here, I will show you how to fix this problem.

So let’s say for example, I have already updated my site and saved it. I will now  publish these saved changes to a folder.

Now I can open up iWeb SEO Tool, and load my published site which is also saved on my hard drive.

The title tags that you currently see, are the title tags that I put in previously, the last time I used iWeb SEO Tool. The tool actually remembers what I had type in, even though iWeb has written over the files when I made my update to my website.

The important thing that I must do, is press on the Re-Apply Saved Tags button. What this does, is it now saves all of these tags to the newly updated site. If I forgot to press this button, and then tried publishing from this tool, the my title tags and everything else would not be the custom tags that I initially put into iWeb SEO Tool, but they would be the default tags that iWeb had created for me when I created the site.

Since I did press the Re-Apply saved tags button, I can now publish my site, and my custom tags will appear as they were before.

iWeb SEO Tool is the only tool available that actually saves our old meta data so it really comes in handy when we make updates to our sites.