by Cyndie shaffstall

Every now and then I get writer’s block. Not because I can’t figure out what to write, but because the product seems so over my head that it intimidates me into silence. SiteGrinder seems like a great product, but far beyond my skill set — thus, writer’s block. With this article now under my belt, I have one thing to say: You have GOT to get this Plug-in!

With that said, I'm also the first to admit that this product is not for everyone. If you're not designing or creating web sites, then you'll probably just want to skip this article. If you're a Photoshop user that is designing web pages and sites, but HTML remains a mystery to you, you will want to read this article twice and rush right out and plop down the $129 – $349 faster than you can say, "OHMYGAWD!"

Let me say right up front that I am not an advanced Photoshop user. I know it about well enough to create layers, adjust images, and down-save to JPG format. Generally when creating art for these articles I have to do a search on the help topics just to achieve the desired result. I am working with layered Photoshop files that were created by Louie Williams of Shift in Longmont, CO, for a friend of mine at CourtSide Consulting, LLC. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, the files that Louie created were great, but the were not exactly what I needed for SiteGrinder. We'll get to that in a sec. For now, here's what I'm trying to create.

There are a few things you will need to know how to do in Photoshop: create and rename layers and create layer comps.

Figure 1 Using these layered Photoshop files and SiteGrinder 2, I'm trying to create a web site.

These are fairly standard skills, so even if you're not a pro at Photoshop, you can easily figure out how to do this. If you need help, MediaLab (the manufacturer of SiteGrinder), has some great getting-started videos on the MediaLab web site.

Using Shift's files, the first thing I had to do was rename the layers and some of the layers within layer groups in order to get items to behave in the desired manner.

My layers palette to the left shows my renamed layers. Compare it to the graphic above and you can see that I have a layer group for each page.

Looking at my layer comps palette, you can see that I have also created layer comps for each page. Don't get ahead of yourself though, layer comps are the final step — I'm just showing you this to illustrate my re-naming exercise.

When SiteGrinder builds pages, it takes its cues from the layer names. Notice that I have footer-text and infoemail-text. This is how I instruct SiteGrinder that I want these elements generated as text items on the web page. Without these cues, this text would be generated as a graphic.

The element titled infoemail-text is actually CourtSide's information email: info@courtsideconsulting.com. Since the text followed a recognized format, SiteGrinder automatically activated the link when the pages were built. That's a handy little time-saver and meant that I did not have to manually create the mailto link.

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