Holiday newsletters bring your relatives and friends up to date about the year's events, but designing, printing, and mailing them can be a chore. This season, save money and time by replacing a traditional newsletter with a Website created in iWeb '09. Here's how.
Catch up with yourself. Photos will be a big part of your site (naturally), and reviewing your iPhoto library can help you get organized and remember events worth sharing.
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In iPhoto, select File -> New Smart Album and create an album of the year's pictures. The Smart Album dialog contains three pull-down menus that give you contextual choices. For example, I chose Date, Is in the range, and then filled in the dates I wanted. There are lots of other parameters to choose from that will let you narrow down your photo choices. Check out the contents of the smart folder, choose the pictures you want to use for your newsletter, place them in a separate folder, and name it something like "Newsletter pictures". Note that you can create as many albums as you want--say, to showcase your camping trip or a special family visit--or you can just assemble all your favorite photos into one album.
Get started with iWeb. Select File -> New Site and pick a theme. iWeb doesn't offer holiday themes, so Leaf Print or Watercolor may be appropriate choices, or maybe just choose a plain Black or White theme that gives you a neutral canvas on which to create your own holiday spirit. Select a My Albums page to begin. To add pictures, select View -> Show Media (or click the Show Media button at the bottom of the window) to show iWeb's Media Browser. Then drag your iPhoto albums into the album template. New Photo gallery pages immediately open to show you each image, and there you can edit captions and other placeholder text.
To allow visitors to download photos at full quality (or leave comments, if you host with MobileMe), select your photo page in iWeb's left sidebar, then select View -> Show Inspector. Choose the Photos inspector, which gives you several options for controlling how your photos can be downloaded or not, and also lets you edit the page's slideshow settings.
To reuse a gallery from another iWebsite you've created, select the original page in the sidebar, then choose Edit -> Duplicate. In the sidebar, drag and drop the duplicated page into your newsletter's My Albums page. You'll likely want to rename the page and change its theme to match your current site.
Add videos with MobileMe. A MobileMe gallery can help make your videos accessible to visitors with a broad range of Internet connection speeds. Start in iMovie's Project Library by choosing a video and selecting Share -> MobileMe Gallery. Export your video at multiple sizes via the resulting dialog.
In iWeb, select File -> New Page, and add a Movie page to your site. Delete the page's placeholder video. Replace it by dragging the Media Browser's MobileMe Gallery widget onto the page. Drag the widget's handles to position it in the space left by the deleted placeholder and then choose a video from the widget's pull down menu, which should include the movie you uploaded. Once uploaded, your movie will be playable from the site page and link to copies of the same file at a variety of sizes.
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