Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Stopping iWeb From Turning Text Links Into Images

Back in September 2010, Rage Software's blog published the provocatively titled post Are You Making The Biggest Search Engine Blunder with iWeb? Well it was provocative to me since I'd been publishing the Tangerine Element web site using iWeb since July 2008 when iTimeZone came out on the App Store. I immediately consumed the article. If you haven't read it, please do so you're up to speed. As soon as I had a chance, I enabled Show text imaging indicator in iWeb. I was horrified, the main navigation for Tangerine Element, as well as other bits of seemingly innocent text, was being converted to images. I burned numerous hours trying to tweak the right combination of settings to solve this problem without success. Eventually I gave up, but I finally cracked it tonight! Here's what to do.

There is a very nice inspector in iWeb that allows you to set properties on hyperlinks. Your hyperlinks are going to be text in text boxes, and this is where you can make all your links into images. If you click your text box and set the hyperlink properties, iWeb will immediately change your text into an image on publish. To get a text hyperlink, you have to double-click so that just the text is selected, not the box, then set the hyperlink properties. This also allows you to set the Format tab properties for rollovers.