So here is a list of some of my current favorites, and as with the last time if you have an iWeb site that you think deserves a mention, feel free to leave a comment or drop me an e-mail and I will see about adding it to the list.

To start the ball rolling on this post is another iWeb site from Scott Williams over at www.eyevero.com (which is also a well designed iWeb site).

Shaver Sports is designed and built in iWeb 3.0.1. I think the old paper effect goes so well with the modern dynamic photos and white background.

JF Photo – a nice clean site built in iWeb 3.0.1. Plenty of white space and a funky nav-bar too.

Mono Machina – The hand-drawn feel of this site is amazing. Very creative.

Cottonmouth – This has got to be one of the best iWeb sites ever built. It’s gorgeous. Great design and fantastic photography too; all in iWeb 3.0.1.

Rapid Ear Movement - What a fantastically different navigation. Great colors and nice use of subtle gradients as well, once again in iWeb 3.0.1.

Silva and Pardo - I just love the color of this site. It looks so clean too and nothing to distract the eye. Smoothness from iWeb 2.0.4.

Cari Smick – The first time I have seen an overlarge photo used as a background and I think it looks great. Once again iWeb 3.0.1.

Altea – El Bodegode Pepe – A simple site which just (in my opinion) looks beautiful.

SuperMarket Creative – Lovely colors and a nav-bar that cries out to be used, a lovely site made in iWeb 3.0.1.

My English Images – A site built in iWeb 3.0.1 and which contains some great images. The navigation stands out well too.

Verheyen Kevin – A super-wide iWeb site built in iWeb 3.0.1. There is a bit of horizontal scrolling to do, but I think it adds to this site.

What do you think of these sites? Have you seen any or (even) have you designed any that are worthy of the praise of the All About iWeb regulars. Leave a comment and let us know.

Obviously you could use any old font for this effect but why not go the ‘whole hog’ and download yourself a neon style font from DaFont.com. There are a few to choose from, for this tutorial I picked Neon Lights; it’s free.

Once you have installed the font open up iWeb and create a new blank page. Insert  a text box and type in the word or phrase you want to ‘glow’. Open the fonts menu and change the font to your chosen neon font then get the size and color as you want it.

Open ‘Inspector’ and chose the ‘Graphic’ tab (that’s the blue circle atop a green square, 4th from the right).

Put a tick in the ‘Shadow’ check box and then change the color to match that of your font (red in my example).

Change the blur to ‘20′, the opacity to ‘100%’ and the angle to zero. Finally drop the opacity of the whole thing down to ‘40%’. I know it looks a little bit dark now, but bare with me.

With the text-box still selected press Cmd+C to copy it followed by Cmd+V to paste that copy. Select the pasted version and with Inspector open change the value of the shadow angle to ‘90°’.

Repeat this stage twice more but this time set the shadow angle to 180° and 270° respectively. You should now have 4 versions of the text-box that all look exactly the same except the shadow is at a different angle on each as below.

Now all you have to do is move all of the images on top of each other and you will see the neon glow appear before your very eyes.

Obviously you don’t have to restrict yourself to just the 4 angles I mentioned above, you can go mad and do as many layers as you want but if you do it is best to lower the Opacity from 40% to 30% or even less.

The same effect can be applied to shapes to so with a little imagination and a bit of patience you can come up with lots of ideas; you could even make your iWeb site the on-line version of Las Vegas. Here are a few I made.

Have you used the neon glow style in your iWeb site? Leave a link in a comment and let’s take a look.

One thing I have noticed however is how many of you have splash screens. You know the sort of thing, a page that welcomes visitors with an image or 2 and the obligatory phrase ‘Click here to enter’.

This got me thinking; why do so many iWeb users have splash screens/pages?

Let’s start by explaining, what is a splash screen. In basic terms it is the first page that a user sees when they visit y0ur site. As a rule it offers no useful content but just serves to whet the appetite of the site visitor. Typically they are used by companies to provide details, or draw attention to the latest products and/or services on offer and (perhaps more commonly) by people in the design world to show off fantastic pieces of work.

In that sense they are a good idea. If you have a fabulous new idea, why not draw attention to it by putting it on the first page. To answer that question you must put yourself in the place of your average site user.

Splash screens annoy people; plain and simple.  Just like pop-up adverts annoy people. In a nutshell if the first page of your web-site is an advert then it is acting in exactly the same way as a pop-up advert that just ….popped-up in front of your web-site.

I am not saying don’t have splash screens, far from it. In the examples I have given above, having a well-designed start page can be a good idea. But it is the ‘well-designed’ part of that sentence that counts.

To begin with there is the navigation. If you are a designer or photographer and have your bestest image on a spash screen why do you only have a ‘Enter’ link. Why not put one for your portfolio too. And if your image really is that good why not let a user contact you too, to enquire about work.

The same applies to a company site. By all means advertise your latest product on a splash page, but add a link to the page on your site that has the rest of your products too, not just to your home page. Who knows, you could sell more.

It is common knowledge amoungst ‘half-decent’ web-designers that you only have a split second to catch the eye of your site visitor and if you don’t catch that eye the user will be off somewhere else. Give users the opportunity to explore further within your site rather than just ‘Enter’. Take a look at the two examples I created below; which do you think would be more useful to a visitor?

Of course the design and look of your splash page is not the only consideration you must take when creating it; there is SEO too. It is the first page of your site after all.

Search engines love keywords, everyone knows that. If you have a splash page as your iWeb sites first page where do you put all of those lovely keywords that relate to your site? The ‘Home’ page no doubt. You could get to the stage where your home page ranks higher than your splash page in a search engine and it eventually becomes redundant; it is something to bear in mind.

At a very minimum give all your images an ‘alt-tag’ using Rage’s iWeb SEO tool (or by adding them manually if you are that way inclined).

In a nutshell, if you must have a splash screen, start page, splash page, call it what you will, make sure it is useful and make sure it helps your SEO.

Do you use a splash screen on your iWeb site? Let us know why and leave a link in a comment.

Open safari (or firefox or other browser) and point it at themesforiweb.com. That’s what I (and my brother) have been, and indeed still are busy doing.

I know there are iWeb themes available to buy on the internet but (and this is just my opinion) they look rubbish and are overpriced. What my brother and I plan to do with themes for iweb is offer you fantastic looking modern themes that look great and don’t cost very much.

On top of that we are open to suggestions. If you think there is a real need for an iWeb theme that hasn’t be built yet or you have had an idea that you think the rest of the iWeb world show get to see, then drop us a line; we’ll build the theme for you free of charge.

I hope you like the idea and will bear with me at All About iWeb whilst we get the themes finished and uploaded. I will keep publishing posts here when I can.

Thanks for your continued support.

If you follow this simple tutorial you can get a vertical nav-bar in no time at all.

Before you create your vertical nav-bar however there is a little warning I must give. You will have to do a fair bit of moving around of the elements on your iWeb site to make the nav-bar fit. If you look at the majority of the iWeb themes you will see many of them are left-aligned.

This means that when you move your horizontal nav-bar and make it a vertical one, you are going to have to make space.

So let’s get on with it; Open up iWeb and go to the page where you want your vertical nav-bar to appear on. Here you can see the default nav-bar appearing at the top of this iWeb page.

If you click on the nav-bar between the links then the ‘handles’ will appear at either end.

Select one of these handles (I chose the right-hand side) and drag it to the left (or right) until the nav-bar is vertical.

Now you will see that your iWeb header area has grown to fit the vertical nav-bar. This is where you have to do a bit of rearranging. Start dragging and dropping items into your header area (you may have to hold down the Cmd key whilst you do it) so that your page starts to take shape.

And there you have it. Creating the nav-bar is easy enough, it’s the moving around of all your page elements that cause a bit of hassle.