Does iWeb Work with Mavericks?

Although Mavericks has been out for a while now, iWeb users who have not yet upgraded have been emailing me wondering if iWeb works properly on Mavericks (OS X 10.9).

The short answer is, yes it will work just as it does on Lion and Mountain Lion.

The long answer is that there is a growing number of features that have stopped working, and they are mostly related to MobileMe closing. These features include Google Maps, MobileMe Galleries, Password Protection, Blog search, and Blog commenting.

Although we have discussed some alternatives for the above such as how to add Google Maps to an iWeb site. The reality is that the work arounds are getting a bit tedious now.

In addition, iWeb will never support the newer features introduced with each operating system or hardware. For example, it is not possible to create Retina ready websites for iPhones, iPads and Retina MacBooks. New CSS techniques that let you properly style text without converting them to images and new, modern styling techniques will never be supported in iWeb. That’s a big shame and something that will hold back your website from its full potential.

As we’ve discussed before, EverWeb is a great iWeb alternative. Recently EverWeb introduced Master Pages which means you can design your site once and then apply that design to all pages on your site. When you want to update your site’s design, you just update the Master Page and your entire site is updated. This also means that re-designing your iWeb site in EverWeb just got much easier. Future updates to your site will also be much more manageable. You no longer have to go through each page on your site whenever you want to make a small design change.

As of this writing, EverWeb 1.3 is in beta testing and includes Password Protection (The ability to have unlimited passwords for different parts of your site, not just your entire site), 404 not found pages and direct FTP publishing.

My recommendation is that it’s time to replace iWeb with EverWeb. There is virtually no learning curve since they are very similar, EverWeb is actively developed for Mavericks and it includes more modern features that can benefit your website.

There is an iWeb to EverWeb video tutorial as well that can help you transfer your website.