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Last year, I launched the initial discussion of this conversion process in “In Search of New Web Site Tools to Replace iWeb, Part I.” In that article, I pointed to Apple’s FAQ that shows which legacy services would migrate to iCloud and which would not. iWeb publishing is not on the migration list. That means many Apple customers will be forced to move their website.
The first step in your own process is to make sure you have all your content on your Mac. That includes not only your text content in HTML, but also your video, audio, and photos. If you used iWeb, you can access your iDisk and manually transfer the content for safe keeping. But that doesn’t solve the whole problem.
You might suspect that the next step would be to export your website from iWeb, but that’s not possible. iWeb has some proprietary components that make the migration very, very difficult. Heretofore, the best solution has probably been to identify and isolate your content and build a new website with a new content creation tool. Then host at the new site of your choice, say, Bluehost.com or Networksolutions.com, two that I am familar with.
One company, Karelia Software, has been working hard to make this transition easier for Apple customers. On June 14, Karelia announced a new version 2.6 of Sandvox, its website creation tool, that includes a new feature called “Extract Content of Website.” As Karelia describes it:
Sandvox 2.6 introduces a new Extract feature that brings text and graphic content from previously published websites, such as those produced using iWeb, into a new Sandvox document. Using Extract is simple: enter the previously published website’s URL and Sandvox will automatically examine the website, analyze the main content, and create corresponding pages in a new Sandvox site document suitable for continued development and publishing to a new webhost.”
Here’s Karelia’s screencast video on how it all works.