A website and (most likely) a blog will be the foundation of your Internet marketing strategy. To create the former, you will need a website editor. This is a software program that allows you to create webpages, most often without needing to know how to write HTML. They do this with a word processor-like interface which automatically and behind the scenes creates the HTML code that describes the webpage to browsers.

The Mac has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to website or HTML editors. There are dozens—so many that I couldn’t begin to describe them all here. So I will have to limit myself to the ones you are most likely to come across.

Most likely, if your Mac was manufactured within the past few years, you already have a good website creation tool installed on your hard drive. That is Apple's own template driven iWeb.

iWeb is based on themes. When you first launch the program, you are immediately presented with a template picker from which you can choose a number of Apple-designed "looks" for your website. Each theme comes with an assortment of page templates built in: a welcome page, and about me page, photos, blog, podcast and so on. Choose a template and it appears in the Main window, with placeholder pictures and text to give you an idea of what your finished site will look like.

Of course, the software is well-integrated with the other Apple iLife products. If you want to add an image, you can click on the Media button in the toolbar to call up the Media Browser (from here you can also access GarageBand to insert one of your podcasts or iMovie to add one of your videos). You add pages simply by clicking the plus (+) button on the left sidebar.

You click the Publish button to upload the site to your server. The original version of iWeb could publish only to MobileMe accounts, although third-party add-ons allowed users to publish anywhere. Now the ability to choose your own web host is built into the software.

Unlike with traditional HTML editors, you needn’t ever look at the generated site pages on your hard drive. If you want to make changes to a page on your site, you merely open the site from within iWeb and re-save your work and the changes are automatically written to your hard drive, ready for uploading to your server.

Although all this makes Web publishing simple, it also means that you cannot make changes to your site from outside of iWeb. After all, any changes you make to the site in a third-party program will be overwritten the next time you save the site from within iWeb. Using the services of a web developer will be difficult unless the developer also uses iWeb.

Unfortunately for online marketers, iWeb's HTML is not exactly SEO optimized; the title tag can have only text on the page, the pages it generates have no heading, meta or alt tags, and its menus are JavaScript-based so search engines can’t index them.

Another problem with the software is that it creates rather large, slow-loading websites. The software is set up so that you can easily make edits to the photos you place on your page at any time, re-cropping them as you desire. This is because the original, uncropped photo is saved by the software. It also means, however, that your website will be rather large. Fast loading websites are important to marketers to avoid losing potential visitors. More and more people have broadband but there are still a fair number of dial-up users out there.