If you read my review of Apple’s iWeb back in January, you may remember one of my biggest complaints was with image compression. iWeb 1.0 used PNG for all images, resulting in images that were way bigger than they needed to be.
Apple has since released the iWeb 1.0.1 update. While iWeb still doesn’t allow you to choose your own compression, it does now use jpg where it can. The results can be significantly smaller files. A header image in my iWeb 1.0 site was a 480k PNG. Publishing the same page with iWeb 1.0.1 kicks out a 68k jpg.
While I would still prefer to have a little more control over the compression, this is definitely a step in the right direction.
The iWeb 1.0.1 update can be downloaded through the Software Update preference pane. After updating you’ll need to republish your site in order to take advantage of the better compression. There is one small catch to getting this done. If you simply open your site in your newly updated copy of iWeb and hit Publish, iWeb will only republish the pages that have changed since the last time you published your site. In order to use the new compression on all of your pages, simply hold down the option key while clicking the Publish button. This will force iWeb to republish the entire site, regardless of which pages have changed.