Over at the home page, I've put up the new design. I decided to try out iWeb for this round, since it came with the latest iLife that I bought for the video I'm editing of our Australia / New Zealand trip.
Once I got accustomed to the interface, I actually liked it. Normally, I like hand-coding my HTML, but iWeb has some really excellent tools for graphics in it. It's like a poor-man's Dreamweaver, I guess. I was able to mask, rotate, resize, and position different photos within the page. The Travel main page is where I tried most of this out, building on the template Apple supplied. It was so easy, I plan on extending this page in the future.
The only part that really annoys me with iWeb so far, is the Navigation Menu. There is no way to customize what is included in that menu. You can choose to include pages or not, but not really add any links to it. I may need to explain what I'm trying to do to clarify this.
iWeb has the concept of a site where you group all of your pages together. You can edit any number of sites, and have them all publish to .Mac under different directories. So, a site called Main is published under /iWeb/Main/Main.html. This is great, because I wanted to have certain sub sites that were just related pages -- like the Travel page. The problem with this implementation was that I could not use the navigation menu to link back to the Main site, or have the Travel site listed from the Main site's navigation menu.
There also seems to be no customization you can do to the Navigation menu, aside from changing the header height to allow it to be under some other page header. It is not positionable like other elements on the page, and you can't select it to change any of the style in it. It's an on or off element per page. Considering how customizable the graphics and text fields were, this is a bit jarring.
Overall, it was quick and easy to use, and I like the program. I still might try out some other site design software, but this is a definite improvement from the old .Mac homepage.