How is SiteGrinder different from PhotoWebber?
Well, for starters, SiteGrinder is available and supported and PhotoWebber is discountinued, unavailable, and not supported.
SiteGrinder is a Photoshop plug-in that creates buttons, rollovers, popup menus, etc. automatically from layer names much as PhotoWebber did. The two big differences are that SiteGrinder does this from within Photoshop while PhotoWebber was a full application that imported Photoshop files, and that SiteGrinder can create multiple pages at once while PhotoWebber focused on a single page at a time.
SiteGrinder has a number of big advantages that improve on aspects of PhotoWebber:
- uses Photoshop's own web graphics compression settings
- can generate an entire multi-page site in one pass
- auto links pages together via the buttons & menus you define
- creates rock solid modern CSS HTML (XHTML 1.1 compliant)
- no longer requires javascript for rollovers and page alignment
- can generate horizontal & vertical navbars from individual text layers
- supports text buttons with hiliting etc.
- supports hybrid buttons made from text and graphics together
- supports all layer fx etc. since it executes inside Photoshop
- powerful layer set and layer comp support
- unlimited levels of popup menus
As of SiteGrinder 2, pretty much every desirable feature of PhotoWebber is now incorporated into SiteGrinder. The only exceptions would be with outdated technolgies that are no longer considered good web development. For example, PhotoWebber had great support for framesets, and supported table-based layout with automatic slicing. SiteGrinder supports neither of these, and nor will it.
PhotoWebber was Media Lab's first entrance into direct Photoshop to web creation, and while a fine tool it had many limitations and liabilities. We feel strongly that SiteGrinder has overcome all of PhotoWebbers shortcomings as well as supporting a lot of new, and frankly quite spectacular, functionality.