Iweb vs HTML

Our last assessment for this class was an Iweb website. Iweb is okay if you want to build a site that doesn't require any specific styling. You are very limited to the way you can make your page look and operate, especially if you are publishing to an FTP and not mobileme. There are certain tricks that you can use to get around most things, but Iweb won't tell you about them.
For example, if you want to use your own fonts, and they are not on a users computer, and not web safe fonts, you have to shadow the text and keep the opacity above 5%. You can still hide the shadow with it's other attributes eg. shadow angle and shadow width. This will make Iweb save the font as an image and it will work on any computer in any browser.
Also, you can't add metatags to your site (without hiding text within your pages) without downloading Iweb SEO tool. There are a few other cool things you can do to your site with this application, and more so with websites in general with downloads found where I found this one at RAGE Software.
Iweb's comment boxes don't work without publishing to Mobileme. I tried a couple of different ones out, just by using the HTML snippets, but they worked strangely and I couldn't figure out why. One in particular works fine with my notepad HTML page, but won't work in Iweb. Don't know.
Although I have only scraped the surface of HTML, CSS and especially javascript, I still find a lot more freedom in coding. Fair enough, coding takes more time and knowledge, but you confined only to the styles that you can conceive. Within Iweb, some of the simplest ideas you have cannot be executed without physically changing the code, which you have to do every time you publish. So why bother using a program that restricts your possibilities, and you still end up reverting back to the code anyway?
The RSS feeds and podcast subscriptions are cool though.
Most of the images are my wife's photography. She is an amazing photographer and I'm not, so that's why most of them are hers.
All in all, the site isn't too bad. Not a lot of content, but if I didn't have to spend so much figuring out why shit just doesn't work, then I might have had more time to add stuff. Doesn't matter. I'm pretty pleased with the overall layout, and I think I'll only change a couple of things before using the site in a practical manner, namely the podcasts. Podcasts rock!

Have a look: http://athene.csu.edu.au/~pfrase07/iweb