I used iWeb back in the day to make early versions of my personal website, as well as websites for friends, before I started learning more about web development and switched to Adobe Dreamweaver. Apple only released two major updates to iWeb, with the last one arriving in the iLife ’09 package. When the company migrated its cloud services from MobileMe to iCloud, the ability to publish personal websites was removed, and iWeb was finally discontinued in 2011.
Even though Apple’s web hosting services are long gone, you can still use iWeb and save your finished site to a local folder or FTP server. The last versions were Intel-native Mac applications, so iWeb should work all the way up to macOS 10.14 Mojave, released in 2018. It can’t run in newer macOS releases because Apple ripped out support for 32-bit applications.
The web has changed dramatically since 2011, so I thought it would be a fun experiment to revisit iWeb and see how its websites hold up to modern standards. I installed iWeb 3 on my old Mac Mini running Snow Leopard and got to work.
I have wanted to do this for years, and major props to Corbin for diving deep on this project.