Once you get everything built to SiteGrinder spec in Photoshop, set the available options and preferences and hit the Build button in SiteGrinder. Everything proceeds quickly and accurately - the larger the site or more complex the pages, the longer it takes for SiteGrinder to grind out the pages or site. In my tests and system, a fairly complex page with multiple buttons, fly-outs and heavy graphics was completed in 3 minutes. No muss, no fuss. If you’ve built a beautiful Photoshop file, you can preview it in your browser or if you saved it to a folder, you’ll now have a beautiful site just waiting to be uploaded.
On a humorous and annoying note, if you are running a Mac box with OSX 5.6 and Spaces enabled, after you engage the Build function of SiteGrinder, you can’t go to another Space and work while it grinds away. After each Build operation in SiteGrinder, Photoshop is brought to the front, switching Spaces automatically and abruptly so you get to watch your computer try to reconcile a split personality for a little bit. I don’t know if there is a way to prevent that but hope it might be included in a SiteGrinder update.
Fundamentally, this program is all about creating beautiful, visually rich web pages easily. Final page size in kilobytes is definitely number two on the priority list.
This is where the Web building “Mr. Pragmatic” in me has to step in. As filmmakers, we’re a visually rich kind of people. What we see IS important so the temptation, enabled by the ease of SiteGrinder, is to make very visually rich sites. SiteGrinder will oblige. But, since SiteGrinder is doing it’s magic from “art files” in Photoshop, the resulting web pages can be extremely large by web standards because they include so much “art” as opposed to visuals based on tiny bits of code . While there are provisions for changing the compression settings of the graphics to reduce file sizes, the default setting is for maximum quality. You can begin juggling compression changes on a per item basis but care must be taken to avoid having adjoining visuals display different and/or noticeable compression artifacts.
In fact, many of the pages even on MediaLab’s site and examples pages start at 200K and top off around 3M - per page - and this does not include any movie media that microfilmmakers will probably be including as well. (As a side note, most Web designers strive to keep pages at between 30k and 150k.) Large K pages require your viewers to have Broadband - and fast Broadband at that. Unless you choose to go graphics-lite, your audience will be downloading Meg upon Meg of data for a modest site. As a bench mark, a 3Meg page on dial-up takes approximately 21 minutes to download and 1Mbps DSL is about 24 seconds. For Cable and Fast DSL (7Mbps) this is not an issue.
All this is because SiteGrinder, by virtue of being easy to use as a default, doesn’t engage the many little “shortcuts” taken by web designers to keep pages visually rich but bandwidth small. If you’re familiar with Web design, I’m talking about using CSS and Div tags that generate a pages “look” on the fly. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, to whittle down the size of your pages, you’ll be required to enter the evil darks side and learn some CSS code writing and conventions. SiteGrinder does allow you to do this but it’s an advanced option requiring some geeky web code knowledge. (And I say geeky with the utmost respect.)
Also, in order to actually get your newly designed site onto the Web, you will need to acquire another piece of software called an FTP client. This is the software that talks to the Web server and let’s you upload and download files from your computer directly to your Web space. There are free ones and shareware ones that are pretty good but the upload/download software tool is not a feature of SiteGrinder.
The value of SiteGrinder is entirely dependent on your current software tools and ability to learn, or want to learn new programs. At $349 for the Pro version, this will be the most expensive plug-in you ever buy for Photoshop. Note, a full license of Adobe’s de facto web designing program, Dreamweaver, is $399 and it includes an FTP client with it.
If you’re predominately interested in simply creating a “brochure” site that you can self manage and not involve other people, SiteGrinder is a very good fit. SiteGrinder eliminates the shock-and-awe interface pain that comes from learning a new software but it won’t really save you any coin on software. It will save you time in learning and cost of aspirin because it’s so easy to use - at a probable price of longer downloads for your viewers, that is.
