What exactly is going to happen to iWeb?

iWeb is not going anywhere. It is an app and you can continue to use it - it works in both Snow Leopard and Lion. MobileMe will cease to exist next year and is being replaced by iCloud, but this has nothing at all to do with iWeb. iWeb is simply an app that you use to create your website and you can continue to do this without having to find any new software at all.

Of course you can make changes to your website and then upload them to GoDaddy - iWeb will still work and it is not going anywhere - if you have it you can continue to use it.

Please note the difference between iWeb and MobileMe - iWeb is the app to create websites with MMe being the host - it is just MMe that will cease to exist next year.

Just a small item, not meaning to rain on the parade, but just so you're forewarned: while it's correct that iWeb is not going to just stop working, it's also highly unlikely that Apple will release any further updates to it. So while it probably will be fine for a while, iWeb will probably not take advantage of any of the new capabilities of Lion or future versions of Mac OS X, and eventually there will probably be a version of Mac OS X on which iWeb will no longer work at all. So you may want to start investigating alternatives so you're prepared down the road.

Regards.

It is now apparent that iWeb, and iDVD, will no longer be supported by Apple. This is evidenced by the fact that new Macs are shipping with iLife 11 installed but without iWeb and iDVD. iWeb will still continue to work but without the following:

Features No Longer Available Once MobileMe is Discontinued:

◼ Password protection

◼ Blog and photo comments

◼ Blog search

◼ Hit counter

All of these issues can be replaced with 3rd party options.

I found that if I published my site to a folder on my hard drive and then uploaded with a 3rd party FTP client subscriptions to slideshows and the RSS feed were broken. If I published directly from iWeb to the FPT server those two features continued to work correctly.

There's another problem and that's with iWeb's popup slideshows. Once the MMe servers are no longer online the popup slideshow buttons will not display their images.

Click to view full size

However, Roddy McKay and I have figured out a way to modify existing sites with those slideshows and iWeb itself so that those images will display as expected once MobileMe servers are gone. How to is described in this tutorial: #26 - How to Modify iWeb So Popup Slideshows Will Work After MobileMe is Discontinued.

Apple has announced that iLife is now an unsupported product and those iApps will only be available thru the App Store from now on. However, the boxed iLife 11 at the online Apple Store (Store button at the top of the page) and those still on the shelves of retailers will include iWeb and iDVD. Those two apps were listed in small, gray text on the iLife 11 box that I bought. Personally, if I already didn't have a copy I would purchase one to have it for reinstallation purposes if ever needed.

It will continue to work until, as Dave pointed out, the system no longer supports it.

OT

I plan to continue using iWeb as long as it works and is useful to me. For my use this can be a few years. There's no point in learning another program now, who knows what options we'll have in 2014.