The first version of iWeb was announced at the Macworld Conference & Expo on January 10, 2006 as part of the iLife ’06 suite of digital lifestyle applications. iWeb ’11 was released on October 20, 2010 as part of the iLife ’11 suite, though it was not updated from the previous release (version 3.0.2). iWeb allowed users to create websites and blogs with their own text, photos, and movies. Users could then publish their websites to MobileMe or another hosting service via Transfer Protocol. In addition to its ability to publish to MobileMe, iWeb integrated with other services, including Facebook, YouTube, AdSense and Google Maps. Apple’s ceased development of iWeb in 2011.
iWeb allowed users to create and design websites and blogs without coding, and included a number of Apple-designed themes. Users could customize these pages by replacing placeholder text and by dragging and dropping their own photos and movies into the document. Templates included blog, podcast, and photo gallery pages, as well as “Welcome” and “About Me” pages. iWeb integrated with other applications in the iLife suite. The iLife Media Browser is a list of all the music, movies, and photos stored in iTunes, iMovie, and iPhoto. Content could be dragged from the Media Browser window and placed in the open page. Local files could also be dropped directly into the page. Nine interactive “widgets” were included with iWeb.
iWeb featured built-in support for publishing to MobileMe, a suite of online applications developed by Apple, and other third-party web hosts with FTP. Once account information has been entered, users simply clicked to submit their entire website. iWeb could then publish updates to the user’s Facebook page.
iWeb was in its third version at the time of discontinuation, and had a limited feature set and some unresolved bugs. Some limitations included:
In June 2011, rumors that iWeb would not be developed further. On June 30, 2012 Apple finally pulled the plug on MobileMe. All iWeb websites hosted on MobileMe disappeared if not hosted elsewhere. Apple provided instructions to move iWeb sites to another host.