WebAssist Site Import is a plug-in for Dreamweaver MX 2004. It is a somewhat strange type of plug-in in that it offers functionality with which you can spy on other sites. WA Site Import enables you to download web pages into Dreamweaver and see how they’re structured.

Imagine this: you’re a web site developer on a very tight deadline. You need to set up a web site just like AlwaysOn or MacNN, or MacCentral. That can’t be hard, because each browser lets you select to see the raw source, right? Wrong. The source of one page doesn’t tell you how the site is structured. In some cases, code has been written to shield your browser from showing that in its source window.

In fact, what you need is a method to download the whole site, so you can see the structure for yourself, and a per-page view of the source, exactly as it is seen by the browser (not a very technical explanation, I know). If you have those two elements, you can reconstruct a site or create one that makes use of the same design elements.

Of course, using the same technology also more or less allows you to hijack a site, which is not what this plug-in is intended for, but which it allows nevertheless. Site Import is like most things: you can use it for beneficial purposes or for purposes which harm others.

This being said, WA Site Import works flawlessly with Dreamweaver MX 2004, and the latest version, released only a few weeks after Macromedia released Studio 8 works great with Dreamweaver 8 as well. In both environments it will let you download the code of parts of or complete websites. It will do so page by page. If it wouldn’t enable you to stop the process halfway through for example, you would end up with a machine that’s barely capable of anything else but downloading code.

You can select the depth of the download --e.g. three levels deep-- or have an entire site downloaded. In most cases, you will not want to download complete sites because with most web sites, that would take forever. However, even with a a few levels deep you already gain an insight into how others create, design and structure their sites.

This knowledge may at first seem like not very useful to you --especially if you are professionally involved with web design-- but if you’re a one man show or a very small operation, you can always learn form the big guys like at Wired, where large teams of people design and develop the web site. The result is that you can learn from their way of doing things. WA Site Import in that respect saves you valuable time as you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. After all, why should you, if you can have the creme de la creme alid out wide open before your eyes and right inside an environment that will tell you where these sites get their looks from.

WA Site Import is also a great tool to have if you run a dynamic, database-driven web site, and you want to have the code generated by the Content Management System locally. Here, WA Site Import will happily download whatever you throw at it. It will not however, download URLs which are not standard in the sense that the plug-in needs a page to download. If your CMS cooks up what seem to be directories instead of pages, like IT-Enquirer’s ExpressionEngine (if so configured), WA Site Import will only download the home page. The plug-in will then “think” there are no more pages to be downloaded.

Conclusion

WebAssist Site Import is a great plug-in to learn from other web sites, to steal ideas and concepts, and to grab scripts, HTML-code and CSS-code for closer scrutiny. Sadly enough, the power of WA Site Import will also enable site hijacking and there’s little webmasters can do to counter this.

Site Import is a blessing for designers and developers who like to start with an existing concept or architecture and build a site from those elements.