With the introduction of iLife 08 you can now have your iWeb sites use your own personal domain that you have registered rather than using web.mac.com/username. For example, my domain, hedgehogalley.com, now points to my web.mac.com site that I have made in iWeb. Previously, the way to have this work was with domain forwarding through your registrar, but you would need to turn on something called masking to hide the web.mac.com address once the web browser got to your site.
Setting up your personal domain is easy, but you did need access to your DNS settings through your registrar so you can make a change to a setting. If you don’t know how to access these settings contact the company your domain is registered with. It looks and sounds intimidating, but it is really easy to do.
Of course, you need your domain registered at one of many registration services on the web. I use GoDaddy.com.
To set up your personal domain you need to log into your .Mac account and enter the Account Settings page by clicking your username after logging in. Click the option of your personal domain on the right. Follow the directions (which will include that DNS change I mentioned earlier). You can also access this page by clicking “Set Up Personal Domain†in the File menu of iWeb (see Macspiration 98). If forwarding is turned on for your domain it is important to turn it off first.
Once the set up is complete entering www.yourdomain.com will send a web browser to your iWeb site. However, you might encounter the same problem I (and many others) have run into. Entering yourdomain.com into a browser without www does not work. In my case, it pointed to a GoDaddy page, because that is where my domain is registered.
After reading many posts in the Discussions section of Apple’s website I have come up with the following solution that worked for me.
After setting up personal domain sharing I went back into my domain’s information at GoDaddy and I turned forwarding back on. I forwarded my domain to http://www.web.mac.com/username (username would be your .mac username). This still maintained the personal domain settings of .mac, but it also fixed the issues of not entering www with my website. It is important to note that forwarding (as I mentioned above) is turned OFF before activating the personal domain. I turned it back on AFTER activation.
If you have any other ideas, please post them below.
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