Zarra Studios iWeb Buddy - TechRadar UK

The key to the success of iWeb is its simplicity.

It makes web building easy, thanks to drag-and-expand templates and drag-and-drop integration with iPhoto, iMovie and other apps. So what, then, is iWeb Buddy?

iWeb made even easier

Well, iWeb Buddy attempts to do away with some of the limiting factors of iWeb. Because iWeb saves the content it generates as a single Domain file, you have to republish the whole Domain file to any new content online.

This could involve publishing many pages' worth of data, just to update a single line on one page. iWeb doesn't let surfers link your content to social networking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us, either.

iWeb Buddy addresses both of these problems, and lets you split individual websites inside the Domain file into separate sites.

Our favourite feature of iWeb Buddy is that it lets you refresh individual pages very easily. This is a great timesaver if you have a site full of rich content and many pages that take time to upload, but you only want to make small updates to certain areas, such as your blog page.

Justified price?

We found the app easy to get along with, but we do question its value.

There are three things working against iWeb Buddy: the lack of a user guide; the growth of free online tools such as iWebsites, which also splits websites made in iWeb into separate domains, or cheap analytical tools such as iComment, which adds in the social networking links; and the fact that you have to close and reopen iWeb Buddy each time you save the Domain file content in iWeb.

If iWeb Buddy integrated its features directly into iWeb, like a plug-in - meaning that we wouldn't have to run two apps to update a single page - that would help, too.

We also suspect that Apple updates to iWeb might remove the need for such third-party apps before too long.