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Using iWeb with Your Custom Domain

While iWeb is a great program, allowing non-designers to create simple, elegant websites, it doesn't easily tell you how to upload your website design to your custom domain name. It makes it easy to upload to your MobileMe account but not to a domain of your choosing.

Here are instructions on how to easily upload your iWeb files to your www.mysite.com domain, and also how you can easily update your website on a regular basis. The instructions are as follows.

(1) Download a free program called “w2w” from the internet at this page: http://www.wallner.nu/fredrik/software/w2w/

To download it, click on where it says “…can be downloaded here” (with a link on the word “here”). This software was specifically designed to get your iWeb files onto the internet.

(2) Double-click the downloaded zip file to expand it to the w2w program file. Copy the w2w program file to your Applications folder, so you’ll have it for future.

(3) Open iWeb. Under the File menu, choose “Publish to a folder.” Choose a place on your computer where you want to store the files for your website. (The default location should be the Sites folder of your user folder, which is fine.) Then iWeb will create a folder and put all the files for your website into it.

(4) Run the w2w program. Click the “+” button on the w2w window to add a website. Fill in the fields as follows:

Name: Can be whatever you want to name this website.
Folder: Use the browse button to navigate to the folder on your computer where you saved your iWeb files in step 1, and choose that folder.
Remote server: Put in the info for your web host. For example, ftp.mysite.com.
Remote username: Your web host should have given you this.
Remote password: Your web host should have given you this.
Remote folder: This is the place your files are stored on your web host. Usually it is “/public_html” so try that.

Anytime you make changes to your iWeb website, and you want them to be live, follow steps 3 and 4 again.