Our blog

Extracting Your iWeb Site’s Contents to a New Sandvox site, Now that MobileMe is Closed

MobileMe is no more.

Apple has been warning its MobileMe subscribers for months that the service would be closing its doors. Now that deadline has passed. Hopefully, most people who had websites published there — whether with Apple's iWeb or third-party tools like Sandvox — have had a chance to migrate their website over to a new location. But we know there are many people out there that have procrastinated, and now their website just shows the "MobileMe is Closed" sign.

Fortunately, there's a way out of this.

Many people who had been publishing to MobileMe were using Apple's iWeb. So while Mac users have been "graduating" to Sandvox for several years, we've recently been seeing a huge surge in iWeb/MobileMe users who are looking for a new way to build a website.

We built a new "extraction" tool into Sandvox 2.6 that allows you to grab the essential content of your website from your published iWeb site, and bring that into a new Sandvox document as a starting point. Our previous blog post demonstrates how to do so with a nice screencast.

Now that MobileMe is closed and iWeb sites published there are no longer accessible over the web, there's still a way to extract your iWeb site by temporarily publishing your iWeb site to your own hard drive.

First you need to publish your iWeb site to a local folder. Just choose a convenient place like your desktop.


You'll need the newest version of Sandvox.  We just released version 2.6.3, which allows you to extract from a local file.  (2.6.3 is available for direct download now; it should be available in the Mac App Store within a few days.)

In Sandvox, click the "Extract…" button from the Welcome window, or choose FileExtract Contents of Website…. Then, click the "Choose…" button to pick your exported "index.html" or "Welcome.html" page; this is the first page of your iWeb site. Sandvox will find the rest of the pages from there.

Now you have a nice starting point from which to rebuild your website.  You can bring in any other content that the extractor may have missed, reorganize things a bit, choose a design that suits you, and get it published to a new web host. (Here's the partner we recommend, but any should work fine.)

Incidentally, we've improved the site extraction algorithm quite a bit since its initial release with Sandvox 2.6. Most notably, iWeb Blog and Photo Galleries are imported much better now.