iWeb offers you 27 templates out of the box. All of these themes are pleasant for the eye and some are well suited for photo web sites. The themes White, Black, Modern Frame could be used as they are for your site. If you are happy with that, just upload your content and you are done.
If you want to present yourself differently and want Google to find your page, you need to put a bit more work in. There is nothing complicated about it. Let us start with your site by choosing the theme White and the template Blank.
Start SEO friendly
You will see your page with the navigation menu and a box called Text. Open the inspector and choose the Page tab. Un-tick both Include Page in Navigation Menu and Display Navigation Menu.
Why? Once you are finished your web site, you want to submit a sitemap to Google. Unfortunately, iWeb uses JavaScript to produce the navigation menu, which cannot be translated into a sitemap format. Google needs the sitemap in order to spider your website.
You have to build your own navigation menu, which might sound daunting, but luckily, iWeb makes this easy for you.
Build your own navigation menu
Build your navigation menu, after you finished building your site. Take out a sheet of paper and write down your structure. Let us say, you work with a basic structure like this:
- Home
- Gallery
- Contact
Once you finished all pages of your site, you will build your navigation menu with text links. You use text links in order to make the menu readable for Google. Avoid fancy fonts, as iWeb transforms these into images, which cannot be read by Google.
Open a new Text box and write Home Gallery Contact next to each other or alternatively, you could choose a different Text Box for each. Highlight the text for Home and open the inspector and go to the Link tab. Tick Enable as Hyperlink and choose in the dropdown menu Link to: One of My Pages and select your Home page in the drop down menu below. Make sure to un-tick Make hyperlinks active as this will avoid accidentally opening a link, while you are working on your site. Do not worry. Even if you leave it unchecked, when you publish your site, the links will work in your browser.
Tomorrow, I will show you how to design your navigation menu and give you an alternative to the built in slideshow of iWeb.
Over the last week, I digged deeper to understand more about iWeb and how to use it for a professional photo website. I learnt a lot, made some mistakes and gathered some wisdom. At least I hope I did.For all PC users: iWeb is an application on Mac computers allowing the easy creation of websites. The user interface makes the creation very easy and the application comes preinstalled with a nice number of professionally designed templates. Adding content works via drag and drop and no coding is required to create an attractive looking site.There are some hidden gems in the application, which I will speak about in one of the follow-up entries. Born out of an emergency, I was able to put together new websites for my domains. That went all very easy and uncomplicated. For a while I was conflicted on how I would organize my sites. 
After my frustration with the recent server upgrade (partly due to my fault) and my positive experience, using iWeb as source for my websites, I will start a new series on creating your websites, using iWeb and other tools. There is some interesting stuff out there and I am happy to share that with you over the next few days.