It’s worth noting that SiteGrinder does not come with a bunch of templates to customize. This is actually a good thing since “template” sites are fairly obvious and belie the look of “original” that I know you want your site to have. However, while there are no templates, there are examples you can investigate on your road to creative web independence that will be a real eye opener about how web designers play visual games. These samples do show valuable ways that can be used to create a truly custom site.
If 2D visual design is not your strong point or you don’t really know Photoshop, SiteGrinder won’t fix that deficiency. We’ve all visited sites that SCREAM “I did it myself” because they look amateurish and clunky. Having an experienced designer prepare your ambassador to the world may not be a bad idea. But if your a good designer in addition to filmographer, then charge forward.
SiteGrinder really covers almost everything most commonly used in Web sites like picture galleries, scrolling text boxes, multimedia, expanding/tiling backgrounds and more. It also takes a certain level of drudgery out of still imagery preparation.
One of the features I really respect is the programs ability to intelligently add controls to the interface only for features that you are building into your Web page. Upon launching SiteGrinder, it will scan your .psd file and then present controls just for the layers that have been tagged with “hints” in their layer names. So, if you don’t use forms, you won’t see form controls, etc.
Other options/features that are built into the program include: automatic conversion of Photoshop type into HTML type (within standard web fonts, that is), multi-level menus (those dandy fly-outs to help people navigate a deeper site easily), form generation (for info gathering and prevention of e-mail spambots), animated Flash slide shows, automatic multipage navigation linking, and finally, if you want to cross over to the dark side, you can edit HTML code, author PHP and create multiple pages from a single template page.
You can also easily customize Metadata on each page. (For those not in the know, metadata is the stuff that Google looks at and incorporates into it’s search engine.)
There is also built in helps and warnings alerting you to potential problems or to help you better choose the point-and-click options that your are presented with. Pretty cool.
This is all good, but...
The user experience is part of the “performance” for any software and SiteGrinder truly makes web design a pleasure and dare I say, fun. The plug-in interface is clean and straight forward. The code written by the program is W3 compliant which is geek talk for www standards ensuring maximum compatibility between browsers.
