Free iWeb themes

Its about reality rather than vision. If more "website designers" got away from their desktops and took a stroll in the real world they would see how the tool of choice is rapidly becoming the iPad Mini and Nexus 7.

At a pinch, a traditional website design can be viewed OK on the iPad if the designer gives some attention to the user inputs. The same cannot be said for this new breed of portable device which, if nothing else, is set to take over the medical and pharmaceutical industries due to the fact that Apple cunningly designed it to fit the standard lab coat pocket.

I can't see the point in encouraging people to create websites with a redundant software which cannot be viewed successfully by a large portion of their intended audience.

Wordpress is even less suitable than the online website builders for producing useable websites. There have been some attempts to adapt it to suit modern website design requirements but these are largely unsuccessfull due to the nature of the beast.

There hasn't exactly been a rush for developers to create a functional drag and drop style software which can be used by designers with little or no technical ability to create viable websites. Most are trying to adapt existing software which is a technique best left to fans of Microsoft and Adobe. I would have thought that an iWeb replacement would be welcomed by the Apple community.

I do, of course, expect any such attempt to be sneered at and criticised by those whose main purpose in life seems to be to criticise and humiliated those coming to this forum seeking constructive help.

Roddy,

I understand what you are saying about responsive design etc, with the advent of html 5 and css3 - I have invested in a couple of books and I intend to see what I can create myself.

As for WordPress, why is it then that so many out there are using it along with the other content management systems such as Joomla? I see what you mean about the 'painting by numbers' and if you have no coding experience whatsoever and are not interested in learning, then WordPress is a very quick and cheap way of getting a website up and running in a matter of hours.

I have looked around at professional web designers who offer to build sites using just the CMS's such as WordPress an Joomla and these are professional developers?

What do you think about things like Drupal and Joomla instead as opposed to WordPress?

I think WordPress has got better from what it was when I used it for a blog rather than a website and more responsive designs are being created all the time.

I really like the Wordpress App for my iPad as well. For editing on the go. Not everyone carries a laptop with them everywhere but, those iDevices seem to go everywhere.

From the questions posed in another forum that I contribute to it would seem that designers who use Wordpress fall roughly into two categories...

(A) Those who have to design for clients who have purchased, or already have, a Wordpress template and need to have it changed to suit their needs.

(B) Those who have no clue about web design and are trying to pass themselves off as web designers.

The main reason for using a CMS is to allow unskilled (cheap) labor to update sites and add content. Most small businesses don't update their sites on a daily/weekly or even monthly basis so why would they need a CMS?

A CMS would normally be used for ecommerce sites that have more than a few products and where the owners are adding to them regularly. If this is the case then they would be better off using a dedicated ecommerce solution like Magento which has a free "Community" version for those on a low budget.

One of my recent projects was to design a mobile site for a large manufacturer of health products. My part of it was to create the design and layout of "template" pages for the different product categories which were then imported into their CMS so that the webmaster and his staff could add the individual product descriptions etc. The main work was in developing a swiping slider with popup pages for extra product info.

If you multiply the number of products by the number of individual pages required for each one plus the category pages, movies and all the other stuff, this website contains several thousand pages. Without a CMS (and somebody with the patience to use it) it would take a long time to create.

I doubt if too many iWeb users run sites of this size! The company did get a Wordpress style designer to attempt this but the result failed to impress the chairman when he tried loading on his iPhone. Apart for that, Wordpress didn't have a plugin that would work for their desired product display method.

Another reason why "designers" use Wordpress for sites other than blogs is that they need login facilities and/or a search function but don't have a clue how to do this themselves or are too cheap to pay for a decent solution.

The profusion of available plugins is another attraction for those that can't implement additional features themselves but they are not exactly cutting edge. Having said that, Wordpress is a lot better than the online site builders in this respect.

But, with this being an iWeb forum I think wordpress is at the appropriate skill set for most of the viewers here.

Some might even argue that Wordpress is too advanced & scary.

I notice that your blog adapts nicely to the iPhone but the template lacks basic features like the code to make the address bar disappear.

The problem is that the designer hasn't allowed for the fact that its fairly hard to read and navigate on an iPad Mini which is rapidly becoming the weapon of choice on the streets.

Like most Wordpress sites, it takes too long to load due to the inclusion of all those scripts and styles that are not required for the page. You can of course delete them yourself and put stuff like the analytics code down at the bottom where it belongs.

Wordpress may suit the skill set of the average iWeb user but at the expense of performance and ease of use. I think I would describe it is unintuitive, bloated and clunky. It may be scary to some but advanced it most certainly isn't!

I use an iPad mini (had the money for a retina but the mini feels good in the hand). The double tap to zoom works just fine for me

The double tap may suit you but the its well documented that most potential viewers will move on to greener pastures if forced to do this for any other reason than poor vision.

Another suggestion you may wish to pass on to the template designer is that fact that the signup form needs to use the appropriate input type to launch the correct keyboard on iOS devices...

http://www.ezmacwebdesign.com/Demo/Responsive-Form-Inputs/datepicker-form.html

I can sympathise with Wordpress designers in that they have to cram in so much stuff that the user will probably never use that they forget about the things that are actually essential!

I am happy with where I am at for the moment. As, most of my traffic is still from computers & not mobile devices I will look into making changes when the time arises.

And no, offense your site looks dated (not saying that it is) & is not aesthetically pleasing. I will take a slower more aesthetically pleasing site personally.

do you know any good tutorial about doing it from scratch black whith blank page?