Well vec, since you ask, I'll tell you.
1) Though a long long time ago I was fairly involved in web design, it has been a long time, things have changed quite a bit, and I am hardly an expert in the field anymore.
2) Building and maintaining the site can be very time consuming, and at times I can find myself spread pretty thin. I've been in my slow season as of late, but it is important that the site be easily maintained without a massive time commitment when my business year is in full swing.
3) I wanted a web development tool that was easy to manage, required little advanced knowledge of web design to use and maintain, and produced a visually appealing final product. This is why I went with iWeb (good call eric
). Though it does seem to suffer from the kinds of things I would expect from any first-gen product, once I get a couple small glitches worked out, it fits the bill pretty well. It manages the meeting reports easily as a blog, the photo galleries with two clicks from iPhoto, and allows enough customization that I can fit all the content cleanly.
I will mention that not everyone seems to be as concerned about the loading time on the site. It loads quite quickly for me, Varj indicated it was fine for him, and a myriad of my friends (well, both of them anyway) have checked out the page today and not complained of poor load times. However, when I was sitting at my favorite hot spot/coffee shop this evening I tried loading it and I have to admit I grimaced a bit. My guess is that for those with slower connections, the load times are somewhere between unfortunate and painful. For those with fast connections (that still complain about the load times), I would hazard a guess that these are the surfers with a particularly low tolerance for any load time at all (10 sec? If the site isn't worth a 10 sec wait to load... well.. then I've failed in a much bigger way I think).
I don't think that having someone "tweak" my code would be of any benefit, because the next time I publish from iWeb it will be back to the same code that we have now. The idea of ditching iWeb altogether is not particularly attractive if I am to continue maintaining this site. I don't want it to sound like I don't appreciate the feedback, but come on guys.... I gotta work within my means here. I need something that will allow me to maintain an attractive site with as little "time in" as possible. In particular, meeting reports, upcoming events, and photo galleries are all updated quite regularly on the LSI site, and the faster I can get those jobs done, the better. If the tradeoff is a site that loads a bit slower than some would like, well, I suppose it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. The alternative is that I find myself without the time to keep it updated. Keep in mind that I do have a life outside of locksports (no really, I do!) and so far I can't say the paychecks from this hobby have been anything to write home about (I couldn't even buy the stationary to write it on anyway).
Hopefully in time LSI will grow to a point where there are enough talented and willing participants that I can get some of this stuff spread around a bit more, but I can't tell you how many hours have gone into my involvement with LSI, and my involvement with LP101 (not even counting just participating here in regular threads, which I would have been doing anyway). I'm not looking for sympathy here, but cut a guy a break.
So, if it seemed as though I just brushed it all off with "I guess I can't please everyone", hopefully you understand why.
db
Sorry Varj. It was probably about 4:30AM when I was putting that together.
