Designing a web page can be hard work, especially when you need to tie together many different graphical elements. With CSS the process actually just got worse, because some things just don’t line up all that well with CSS. Which is why traditiona wants web page design to be a lengthy process. But SiteGrinder Pro 2 takes the time out of designing web pages. It is fully CSS capable, Flash capable even, and it only takes Photoshop skills. And the results can be quite stunning.

The SiteGrinder 2 Pro workflow goes like this: design your page elements, preferably with each one having its own layer, open SiteGrinder, click its Build button, test, publish. Admittedly, this is only so for very simple pages, but the basic workflow principle remains the same, regardless of how complex your web page design may be.

Photoshop and web design. Usually, you expect the venerable image editing application to handle only the design of the images that will make up the mockup page, or the buttons, or other elements on a page. SiteGrinder break with this ‘fenced in’ view of what Photoshop can do. In fact, the only thing you can’t handle with SiteGrinder and Photoshop, is the web site structure. For that, you’d better use Dreamweaver, Golive or your old faithful BBEdit or HomeSite.

But people who are visually orientated, like graphic designers, will love the way SiteGrinder 2 Pro allows them to build a page design and then automatically create the HTML, CSS, Flash and everything else that is part of the web design process. Usually, though, the professional web designer will hesitate using a program that wasn’t designed specifically for creating code. Most of the tools that claim to simplify web design create awfully bloated code. SiteGrinder 2 is different in that respect too. I checked the code myself and found it was pretty lean.

Of course, it can still be fine-tuned by someone with the skills, but it’s far better than what you’ll get from iWeb or even Golive for that matter. This makes SiteGrinder 2 Pro a really professional tool; it’s not just an easy way to get to flashy designed web pages. They will load quickly too.

SiteGrinder's learning curve

Isn’t there a learning curve with SiteGrinder? Yes, there is, but it’s more a matter of getting used to doing things a certain way than it is really a matter of learning a whole new system. For starters, the fact that it depends on Photoshop makes it suitable for people used to working with Photoshop Layers and Layer Groups. Knowing your Photoshop Comps is also recommended.

The only thing that stands between a seasoned Photoshop user and SiteGrinder success then, is the discipline to always name your layers and to learn some of Photoshop’s higher-level capabilities. Layers should be named in compliance with a specific naming scheme so that SiteGrinder recognizes the use for each layer.

Buttons, for example, take no more than a few minutes to build, provided you don’t forget to call each layer of the rollover button you’re creating according to SiteGrinder conventions. These are intuitive, I might add, but with version 2, a number of new naming conventions must be learned. And that is entirely due to the new capabilities of the plug-in.

For example, SiteGrinder 2 Pro will allow you to create text boxes on a page that grow with the content poured into them. This is great news for those of us who deal with a Content Management System for feeding our sites with textual content. SiteGrinder can then be used as a skin creator where the dynamic text boxes’ sample content can be quickly replaced by the code from the CMS.

While SiteGrinder will not build your site structure, it will in this version allow you to set up site skeletons in much the same way. The feature is called Page Cloning and it enables you to build just one or two page designs and fill up the pages with extra code in a separate application. Again, very useful if you’re running a CMS or a weblog.