I know what many of the web developers are thinking; this will create some bloated code that would never work in the real world. It might work on some small rinky-dink site that gets no real traffic, but try to put a load on it and it would die the death of a thousand paper cuts. Well, no, I don’t think that it would. The code that it creates is really lean, clean, and functional code. Sure in the hands of a pro, it could be refined, but as it is you will find it really quick to load. To see check out some of the sites listed at the bottom to see how quickly they load.
The CSS is pretty efficient in its own way. If you add styling to a single page, it puts the CSS in the HEAD section. If you have multiple pages it creates a separate CSS file. The pro version supports the generation of image galleries. You can do this in the basic version, but there is a lot more work that needs to be done. In the pro version it is much more automatic and will create thumbnail images as well.
The Pro version also supports Flash animated Slideshows. Slideshows are similar to galleries in that they are generated from folders of images. They automatically scale to the size of the slideshow layer and the backgrounds match page backgrounds. They include a variety of timing, effects and transitions settings, and mp3 background music is supported as well.
The Pro version is able to use external multimedia elements on a page. Supported media types include Flash, animated GIF files, digital video and audio, as well as external images. Media local to your hard drive is copied to your build folder and media from the internet is linked as is via URL's and appear on your pages from their original locations.
The Pro Version has support for incorporating external HTML files into your pages either when SiteGrinder 2 Pro builds them or dynamically when a visitor to your page loads them. By doing this you can incorporate web content on pages not created in Photoshop. This can include long text or PHP controls such as calendars, blogs etc.
The basic version runs $129 USD and the Pro version is $249 USD. The version of SiteGrinder 2 that I reviewed was the Pro version. So what are the differences? You can visit MediaLab's online for a complete list, but suffice it to say that the Pro version contains those items that will give your site that professional look with things like the heavy duty multimedia, the automated image galleries, the HTML Forms and dynamic binding of external HTML via PHP.
Article comments
1 - Linda
Thanks for this review.
Would you say more about this, please:
"Once that is done, it can be put into Dreamweaver, Golive, or just handed over to the web developer to plug in any other heavy lifting that needs to be done. It also will be a boon to anyone who needs to put together a site and does not need any additional work done."
What heavy lifting or additional work might remain to be done? What kinds of things *can't* you do with SiteGrinder?
2 - Kyle
I too would love to know more about that.