Rating: 94%, Star rating ******If you want to build beautiful feature rich sites without any hand coding then you need SiteGrinder 3.
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SiteGrinder 3 Review
After an extended trial, I’m now ready to give my full review of MediaLabs SiteGrinder 3 Photoshop Plug-In. So was it worth the wait? Read on and find out.
It’s not an overstatement to say that 9 out of 10 websites are designed in PhotoShop. From logos to layout to site design and layout Photoshop is most designers first point of call. It’s simply much easier to test and refine designs in a graphic design program and then transfer, either by laborious slicing in Fireworks or by hours of painstaking coding, into DreamWeaver for publishing and deployment. SiteGrinder, which is a PhotoShop Plugin, takes the slicing and coding part out of the equation by converting your PhotoShop document into HTML compliant code in one click of your mouse. It really is that simple.
The SiteGrinder Engine, which is a separate entity to Photoshop itself, is launched directly from the automate Menu in Photoshop and happily runs in the background converting your PSD into compliant code.
The key to the functionality in SiteGrinder 3 is naming your layers in PhotoShop, so for example, if you want to create a menu from a block of text in your PhotoShop design, you simply add a ‘layer hint’ to the layer name and on conversion SiteGrinder will create a menu from that layer. There is a full list of so-called layer hints in the extremely well designed documentation section of the MediaLab site. There are many layer hints, from external media to hover-overs to galleries, each of which SiteGrinder 3 will convert to the appropriate HTML element in the build phase.
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However SiteGrinder impresses even more when you realise the subtlety of it’s understanding of your Photoshop document. For example lets consider the -menu hint we assigned to our text layer above, how does SiteGrinder know what type of menu we want to build, simple it just looks at the layout of your text menu. Lines of single spaced text will be converted into a vertical menu with each line a separate link, and lines of double spaced text to a horizontal menu. All the menu elements, as with most SiteGrinder built elements are fully customisable in the Design Manager section of the plug-in.
Loading file types that are not supported in PhotoShop is simply a matter of giving the -xmedia hint to your layer, this allows embedding of Flash, CSS Galleries, Spreadsheets and many others. This function impresses a lot, giving the ability to build rich-media sites very quickly and easily.
There’s even a built in error checker, you simply open the SiteGrinder application and it’ll inform you of any errors in your PhotoShop document, such as layers with misspelled hints.
Adding pages is done either through the use of Layer Comps in Photoshop itself or through the Content Manager section. This makes building and expanding large, multi-page sites much easier in SiteGrinder 3 than in previous versions.
The Design Manager is also a new feature of SiteGrinder 3 this allows you to format most page elements in your design after the build, using a simple system of menus you can also define styles which can be applied to other elements in your design. Elements that can be formatted here include text and menu styles, graphic and table borders and list formats.
Click here for free SiteGrinder 3 Dem0 >>
The local Content Manager section allows you to edit content within your SiteGrinder 3 built site before uploading to the web, here you can edit text, add images and external media. This runs in a web browser so you can be sure that your completed site will look and perform as it did during deployment.
One of the most exciting new features of SiteGrinder 3 is the Control Add-On, purchased separately this allows full content management of SiteGrinder 3 built sites from any web browser using a remote log-in systems. You can edit content, images, galleries etc and also add new pages to the site with this add-on. The system works very very well and is a useful addition to the package.
ECommerce is also available through the Commerce-Add on.
Also included is a full FTP client so you don’t need to export and upload through a 3rd party app, this keeps things clean and easy and also allows the ability to upload only changed elements to your remote server. This again is a very welcome addition to SiteGrinder.
Summary
MediaLabs have once again upped the bar in no-code web design, this is truly a superb product which’ll have you grinning as you build sites you could only have imagined before SiteGrinder 3. MediaLab support is excellent as usual and there’s a massive amount of documentation and very useful videos at the SiteGrinder 3 site. I’d recommend starting with the free demo which you can get here.
SiteGrinder 3 Rating
Rating: 94%, Star rating *****
Steve Q
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