Evil. For the creative spirit, it’s the only description that really fits Web design - even if you do it professionally; I know from personal experience. It’s 96% behind the scenes work and 4% glory when people see it if it behaves as expected. All the rules, the conventions and requirements that must be used to make things work well online that are necessary but suck the life out of you if things don’t go as planned. (In fact, editor-in-chief and fellow web designer Jeremy Hanke has one word he uses to refer to the inconsistency of all web languages to behave predictably: "Voodoo." Enough said.)
As a microfilmmaker, building Web sites may not be your “core competency” and the only reason that you are even interested in making a site is because you need to market your film, establish legitimacy and, maybe, even attract investors.
If you find yourself looking at a Web site as a necessary evil, then a look at Media Lab’s SiteGrinder is definitely worth your time. Simply put, Site Grinder is a Photoshop plug-in on steroids--serious steroids. Site Grinder allows the user to design their ideal page(s) while comfortably nestled in the familiar world of Photoshop and all the plug-ins that you’ve accumulated over the years. Then “writing” your Web pages from within Photoshop is accomplished by the push of a button.
SiteGrinder comes in two versions: Pro and Basic. I’ll be reviewing the Pro version because it handles multimedia files (you know, video and flash which is probably something that you, as a filmmaker, might be interested to include in your site). A complete comparison can be found here.
No coding required. SiteGrinder has to be the epitome of WYSWIG (What You See Is What You Get) Web design. It’s really a “no-brainer” to use and let’s you create a lush, and inviting page or entire sites that look very much in your browser the way it looks in Photoshop. You can test your layouts and view them in a web browser without writing-out the real files to a final folder
Let’s clarify “no-brainer” though. You do have to know your way around Photoshop. In order for SiteGrinder to do it’s thing, you have to follow very specific naming conventions and, for your sanity, be very meticulous in your Photoshop layer management skills. SiteGrinder, unless you get fancy, will create your entire site from a single Photoshop file. All the buttons, special effects and interactive elements you create will all be contained within a single file with a ton of layers and folders.
It’s nothing difficult though. If you want a button on your site to have a “normal” look and also have a “rollover” effect like a color change, then you achieve that by creating a layer in Photoshop for each look or state and appending the name of the layer with a hyphen, i.e.. CoolButton-b (to designate a button), CoolButton-r (for rollover) SiteGrinder will do all of the ugly code writing required to make your Web page function correctly. Likewise for everything that SiteGrinder will convert into an element on you site - they all use special text “hints” that must be included in every named layer.
The documentation for the program is extensive, easy to access, understand and use. And for us visual types, MediaLab has online video tutorials that walk through most everything you need to know getting started. The things that aren’t covered in videos are typically variations on a theme that are covered by one of the other movies. All this is backed up by plainspoken, written documentation that comes with the program with even more help online if required.
