iWeb doesn’t have a Group-ing function. This much is clear. Go ahead, create a duo of objects (trio if you’re feeling trois-y), and try to get one to follow the other. Oh, and no cheating by holding down the Shift key while clicking on several objects, then moving them. Click one object, start dragging and have another one come along for the ride. Can’t be done!

Fortunately, iWeb is closely related with the apps in iWork. The job of webweaving may be greatly different from presenta-ting, but, shapes from iWork exist in iWeb happily. (You can tell when an iWebber has used a shape because iWeb renders that shape as an image with the name of shapeimage_ with a number.) Because of close relationship, if you gather a set of objects together in Keynote and group them,

when you copy and paste that group into iWeb, it maintains it’s groupiness. It even keeps the blue bounding box letting you know that this isn’t one object, it’s what is technically known as a buncha objects.

When I played with this inter-app interaction some time ago, I found that these Grouped objects in iWeb would always render as one large object when Published. This was a benefit because you could build large or complex sets of shapes, Group them in an iWork app, and have it render as one easy to render image (many shapes=many images=longer load time). If you ever needed to change a member of the group, simply copy it into an iWork app, Ungroup, make the change, Group it again, and back into iWeb. As you may have guessed, this is no longer true with the latest version of iWeb. Now, iWeb not only accepts groups, but it understands them to the point of knowing that the group is made up of individual parts... and will now render those individual parts individually. Which is why the two fellers on the top of this page both take a little while to load (regardless of what the actual text says!).

So what does one do to a group of objects in order to get them to render as one? Preview Passthru. Quite simply,

1. 1)Copy the objects
   

2. 2)Open Preview
   

3. 3)Do Command-N
   

Now that you’ve got it in Preview, you can either save it to a file (PDF, PNG, JPG, etc.) or just Copy again and paste into iWeb (or any other app you like). What you can not do with this is bring that group back into an iWork app, Ungroup and change. Once you take it into Preview, you give up being able to edit it’s fill or stroke or any of that. The way I work around this is I keep a Keynote notepad of all the artwork I create. If I need to make changes, I find the old file, update the shapes, Preview Passthru it, and it’s ready.

Yes, that means I’ve got a lot of .key files hanging around, but they really come in handy whenever I want to repurpose my prior work. If you build your own shapes, you can even share them with others in a Keynote file (as I’ve done on some of my pages). It doesn’t matter if they don’t have Keynote, anyone can download the iWork trial for free. Even after it times out after 30 days, users can still open and copy from a Keynote document, so have at it!