How do I quickly generate a site skeleton?
One of the things SiteGrinder is really, really good at is quickly generating a number of pages with identical content and the navigation to jump between them. You can then add unique content that may not be appropriate in Photoshop to these pages in a separate package such as GoLive or DreamWeaver.
This means you can use Photoshop and SiteGrinder to set up a nice graphical frame and navbar, and then grind out any number of pages containing these elements and pre-linked to each other. Then all that's left to do is add the unique content by opening up these pages in another tool.
This is all accomplished using SiteGrinder's "clone pages". The workflow is simple:
- Set up the Photoshop document with the generic background content, buttons, and menus that you want to appear on every page
- Open SiteGrinder
- In the Pages pane you will see a list of pages already there. The pages are named after the buttons and menu items you made in the document.
- Click the Build button to build these pages. Their content will be derived from the last state of the document before you opened SiteGrinder. (You don't have to derive generic pages from the last document state only. If you have a pages defined you can pick one to clone undefined pages from.)
- When the web page opens click the buttons and menu items to navigate around the site you just made. Notice that while the pages look identical, there names are different in the title bar of the browser window.
That's all it takes. You can also easily create a site in which some of the pages are predefined by you and others are duplicates of the last document state or duplicates of some of the defined pages.