SITE STUDIO
(Introduction)


Have you ever felt amazed at how things changed over the last years? The Internet

has become as common as the telephone. E-mail makes people totally forget about the existence of regular mail. Having a web site is now more important than having a business card.


Actually, many people now think that having one web site is not enough. Really, would you present yourself the same way to your potential employers, family members and former schoolmates? Of course not! On the first site you would probably place your professional resume—and will refer to it in an employment classified. On the second, you would place new pictures of you and your fiancé—you may want to share them with your parents in Minnesota and your sister in Paris. On the third, you will open a picture gallery out of the old school pics—maybe, this will help you find your old good friend whose trace you lost many years ago…


And so, you have decided to make up your own website. High time! But do you know enough HTML? Or do you want to create your site using a text editor? In either case, you will end up spending days and days to have your site look attractive and getting all things work. Not the best solution. Or, maybe, you want to pay hundreds of dollars for the web designer to do the job?


Well, here is the solution. We will save your time and efforts, and what’s even more important, you can be personally involved in the Art of Web Design. To create a professional-looking web site using Site Studio, you don’t need any special knowledge or experience. The wizard-like program structure will guide you through the whole site-construction process step by step. Now you become a web designer, a creator, an Artist! You can juggle around with page layouts, colors, themes, add various effect and much, much more, everything with a single mouse click!  Within a half hour you can have your site created and published on the Internet!


So, if you feel this is what you need, welcome on board!

One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

ADDING PAGES


Add A Page


SiteStudio allows creating websites in two categories: Personal and Small Business.
Each category serves its own purpose.


A site in each category constitutes of a series of pages, each devoted
to a separate topic, article or resource. Site Studio offers you a set
of templates for all common pages:


To add a page to your website, click the Add A Page icon in the top panel.

Personal


In the Personal category you can create a site for your fiends, school-mates and relatives.
You can tell about yourself, your background, hobbies, share funny stories and show your photographs.
Here you can also post your resume for potential employers and even more.
To create your personal website, add any of the following pages:



  • Splash Screen:
    the home page or index page that welcomes visitors and contains references to all other pages.
  • FlashSplash:
    the home page or index page with Flash elements that welcomes visitors and contains references to all other pages.
  • About:
    the page to provide information about the purpose, the owner of the site and any other relevant data.
  • Download Page:
    the page where you can upload any files with descriptions to them. Visitors of your site can later download them.

  • Resume:
    if you seek employment via the Internet, this is the central page containing short account of your career and qualifications.
  • Links:
    the page where you list your favourite links to related websites or pages.
  • Custom Table Page:
    a page with any data organized in table format.
  • Site Map.
    If your site is becoming complex and hard to navigate, a site map will become helpful to get around.
  • Photo Album:
    a sequence of pages containing images. You may want to use it for posting photos of yourself, your friends, your family, your art works, postcards,etc.
  • Your Own HTML.
    This tool allows to copy-paste an existing HTML page and create a web page based on your own HTML script. Recommended for advanced users.
  • Humor:
    a tool that helps you organize your jokes, funny pictures, humorous stories and other fun topics.
  • Survey Form:
    a quick tool for drawing up visitor questionnaires.
  • Generic Page:
    a powerful tool to create pages with any layout, containing both text and images.
  • Genealogical Tree:
    a quick tool for creating a family tree. The output is a list of entries each devoted to an ancestor or a family member.
  • Calendar:
    the page where you can list events with dates and comments.
  • ICQ Contact Center.
    If you extensively use ICQ, you will find this form of messaging the most convenient.
  • Driving Directions:
    a powerful tool for visitors to get the driving directions to the place in North America that you specify.
  • Amazon.com Web Store.
    If you want to offer your visitors some books for sale, this is the page for you. To use this feature, you need to sign up with the Amazon.com associate program.
  • Mobile Pager.
    A page from which site visitors can reach you on a cell phone or a pager with Internet messaging support. To use this feature, you need to be subscribed with Bell Atlantic Mobil or Sprint PCS.
  • External Page.
    If you own two different sites or your friend or business partner own a website, you may want to interconnect them. This page is most convenient to address site visitors to different site.


Every time your site is visited, the first page to open would always be either FlashSplash or Welcome Page, or Splash Screen. These page will also automatically include links to all other pages you create. So, it would be a good idea to begin your site with one of them.


After choosing a page, click Next to continue with the design of the page.

One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window


Tabs


Look at the tabs right under the toolbar menu. They supplement every page-designing tool:

Edit tab opens by default, suggesting that you should enter or change your data before viewing it. Forms in the Edit tab vary greatly from page to page.

View tab allows you to view your changes. This option is always available when you work on Edit or Settings tab. This means that after you introduce any changes to your page data or settings, you can immediately view them by clicking the View tab.

Settings tab. Here you can customize all parameters for your page. For details go to Standard Settings Tab.

Delete tab permanently removes the page from your site.


Note: You can switch between tabs to change any data or settings

any time during the page construction process or later.

One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

Rich Editor


Rich Editor is a multi-function SiteStudio tool that provides a
number of features for creating and editing pages. Rich Editor is very
much like MS Word or any other editor which makes it easy for you to
use. This tool is available only under Internet Explorer (Microsoft)
and in SiteStudio it can be available in any pages with input boxes.


With Rich Editor you can easily copy any table, image or text from a browser and paste it to the SiteStudio rich editor page.

To do this, select text in the browser or in text processor and paste it to the page with.


Important: If you copy an image from a browser and publish it on your site, it will be linked to the original location.
If the website, where you have taken the image, changes its location, you may face some problems.
Therefore, you’d rather upload images to SiteStudio using the Image Uploader.

On the Rich Editor page:



Click to save current changes and go on working with this page.

Click to save changes and exit Rich Editor.

Click to exit Rich Editor without saving the changes.

Click to revert to the last saved version.



Click and
to repeat or cancel the last action.

Click to cut selected text, table or image.

Click to copy selected text or table to another location.

Click to paste selected text from the clipboard.



Click to create a hyperlink.

Click to create or edit email address.



Click to see the structure and guidelines
of the tables with 0 border. It is especially helpful when you need to delete or re-organise some rows or columns.

Click to insert a table. It will call a web-page dialog
where you can set the number of rows, columns, cellpadding and the color of a table.

Click to upload an image to this page.
Follow the instructions on Uploading images to add necessary images.



Click


to set off the selected text in bold, italic or underline.



Clicking


allows to align text to the left, center, right or to justify.


Clicking and
allows to create a numbered or bullet list.

Clicking and
allows to shift indent to the right or to the left.

Clicking to change text color and
to highlight a text with specific color.

One Step Back   |  

Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window


Standard Settings Tab


Page Title


Page title is the text that will show at the top of the menu bar. In this

field, you can change SiteStudio default name from “Fun Page” to, say, “Laugh with us”.


Button Text


This is the text that will show up on your site’s menu among other page names. It may be the same as the Page Title, or you can give it a different name. For example, if your Page Title is “Fun Page”, you may want to add some versatility by typing something like “Smile!”


File Name


Technically, your site is nothing but an organized inter-linked group of html pages (files). SiteStudio enables you to assign a specific name for every page that you add to your site. It is recommended that your file name only includes letters of Latin alphabet and numbers. Try to avoid non-Latin characters, spaces, underlines, commas, dots, hyphens, etc.


Title, Text, Heading


You can select:


  • Font – use pull-down menu;
  • Color – click on Change color button, when the color scheme appears, click on Selected color;
  • Lettering Style—simply click on letter symbol.


After you change the settings click Next to see the result.


Rollover effect


When you move your mouse over some elements on a page, they may change their color, shape and other properties. This is called Rollover Effect.


Background Image


You can place the contents of your page on an image. However, try to be discreet with choosing the background. Avoid using photographs or bright decorations, as they may hinder text readability.


Colors


SiteStudio allows you to change the color palette for every site’s page. Their default HTML codes are in the boxes next to the parameter names. You don’t need to know these codes. Instead, click the icon to call a Color Picker—a palette with colors available—and select the color you like. The “Color” section allows you to change background, text and links color. Just select the element you wish to modify and click on the color you like.


Note: If you decide to change background color, ensure that the text on your page is clearly readable. There must be sufficient contrast between the text and the background image. A background with too much contrast competes with the text for reader’s attention and makes it difficult to read.

Banner


A couple of designs in SiteStudio allow adding banners on user sites: Stylish Oval (for both website categories)
and Strong (for Small Business category ). In this case simply enter the HTML banner code into the
Add your banner code input box on the Settings tab.


In other designs, users can add banners only as images with hyperlinks

by entering the banner code in any of the Paragraph boxes under the Edit tab.


Disable banner on this page: Check this box if you want to avoid adding banners to this page.

 

Secure


You can make your page open to general public or closed (secure). Secure sites

or pages are often used by multinational companies to communicate closed information to its representatives worldwide, where e-mailing is not appropriate.

To secure restrict access to the page, choose Yes. The frame will expand to include a drop-down list box where you can choose who is allowed to view the page: none, all users, some users, some groups, some IPs and domains.

  • Choosing none will disallow access to this page for all users
  • Choosing all users will open access to this page for all users
  • Choosing some users will open access to this page for specific users. To open them an access, check boxes near the users and click Next to proceed.
  • Choosing some groups will open access to this page for the chosen groups. To allow access, check the chosen groups and click Next to proceed.
  • Choosing some IPs and domains will open access to this page for specified IPs and domains.
    To allow access for specific IPs and domains, enter IPs and domains into the Some IPs & Domains to Allow box separating them with hard return.
    To restrict access for specific IPs and domains, enter IPs and domains into the Some IPs & Domains to Deny box separating them with hard return.

To create an authorized user or user group, go to Site Settings -> Edit Security Information (for comments see Edit Security Information help section).

Invisible Pages


From version 1.6RC1 and higher, Site Studio allows to avoid linking pages to site navigation menu.
Visitors won’t be able to see such pages from the website menu and from the Site Map page.
However such pages are available from the top SiteStudio panel – Site Map.


To make page invisible from the menu, click the Page Settings tab,
scroll down to the bottom the page and check the Make this page invisible box. Make sure to click Next to proceed.

One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

Adding Plugins


With 1.6RC3 SiteStudio offers additional plug-ins: guest book, counter and online poll.



  • Guest Book allows to see the feetback posted by the visitors of your website.

  • Counter allows to view statistics of visits to your website.

  • Online Poll: choose it to get your visitors opinion about your website or services in a form of a questionnaire.



One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

Uploading Images


If you want to upload an image to your webpage,
click the Select Image button and you will see the Image Uploader page.
In Site Studio you can upload images from your computer,
from your image gallery and from the gallery provided by your hosting provider.


To upload image with Rich Editor, click the
button on the Rich Editor page.


  • Upload: upload files from your computer.

    You can upload images into the folder images/ or create new destination subfolder.

    • To upload the image:


    1. Click Browse and go to the directory or folder on your computer where your picture is saved.

    2. Select the picture you want to add to your page

    3. Click the Open button. The location of the selected file appears in the “Upload Image” window.

    4. Click the Save button in the “Upload Image” window.

    You can upload up to 5 files at once.


  • Your Gallery: choose from the images that you have uploaded before.

  • Our Gallery: select images from the Site Studio provided by your hoster.
    Users can use these images, but they can’t upload or change images in this gallery.

  • Options: choosing this tab will bring you to the Gallery Options page. Here you can:
    – Show images with the following extensions in your gallery: gif, jpg/jpeg, png and bmp;
    – Show/not show image thumbnails;
    – Set Thumbnail size (one of 3 options);
    – Sort images by name, size and date (in ascending or descending order).

    • Make sure to click the Save button to save all changes.



Clicking the lens icon in the image gallery will zoom the image out.


Clicking the Resize Image icon will let you change image size.

If you resized image in Our Gallery (customer’s gallery), then the resized copy will be stored in

Your Gallery. The reason is because user has no permissions to resize or change images of the provider’s gallery.

One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

Order Pages


To re-order your pages do the following:


  • Click to highlight the name of the page that you want to move;
  • Use the and buttons to move the selected item up or down the list;
  • Click the Next button to save changes.


One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

Site Map


Here you can see and inspect all the web pages your web site

consists of.


  • to preview page content click View. You will be brought to the page’s View tab.
  • to change, add or delete info—click Edit. You will be brought to the page’s Edit tab.
  • to delete the page click Remove. The page will be permanently deleted.
  • to change the look and feel of the page, click Settings. You will be brought to the Page Settings tab.


Important: Whatever long the page title is, it will show only 25 symbols on the Site Map.
For example, title Johnsons Family Genealogical Tree will show as
Johnsons Fa… Genealogical Tree.

The same length preserves for page titles under the toolbar on the top of the page, between the Delete and View tabs.

One Step Back   |  
Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

SITE SETTINGS


Click the category you need help with:



Note: When available, use the navigation buttons inside the browser window. For some pages, your browser’s Back and Forward buttons will not work correctly. If a page fails to load, or does not reflect last changes, click your browser’s Reload or Refresh button to update the page.


website category

SiteStudio allows creating websites in two categories: Personal and Small Business.
Each category serves its own purpose. A site in each category constitutes of a series of pages,
each devoted to a separate topic, article or resource. Site Studio offers you a set of templates for all common pages.

In the Small Business category you can create a site representing your company or business.
It’s a good mean of telling about the history of your company, listing the services you render or
products/goods you sell. Here you can also create your own online store, look for new employers and more.

In the Personal category you can create a site for your fiends, school-mates and relatives.
You can tell about yourself, your background, hobbies, share funny stories and show your photographs.
Here you can also post your resume for potential employers and even more.

To select a website category:

  1. Click (highlight) the category that corresponds to the kind of web site you want to build.
  2. Click NEXT to proceed with creating of your web site.

You will be brought to the Select Website Color and Style page.


Attention: Once you begin to create your site you may not change the website category!!! To change the category, you will have to start anew, which will delete ALL PREVIOUSLY SAVED SITES.


website color & style


Choosing a correct layout is crucial for the success of your web site, as it

will determine the look of every page. Site Studio is equipped with a number of pre-designed Overall Site Layouts. Go through the list in the upper left box by mouse-clicking each item or using cursor keys on your keyboard. Sample pages will be shown in the preview window on the right. Stop on the one that will best suit the contents of your site.


Then, select a color scheme in the lower box. It will only affect the menu bar; colors for every individual page are set at a later stage (see Standard Settings Tab).


You can change your layout and color scheme any time in the future without losing any information whatsoever, even when the construction of the site is complete.


One Step Back   |   Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

 

Selecting Site Layout

The checkbox allows you to apply selected layout and color scheme to all pages

on your site. It comes checked by default. If you uncheck it, the layout and color settings will only affect the pages you create after applying these changes; the pages you created before will remain unchanged. Changing this option doesn’t affect your settings in any way, if you are only beginning to create your site.

After you select the layout and color settings, click Next to move on.


Global Settings


Web readers often want or need to contact the person who created and maintains

the web site. Global Settings form requires you to enter basic information that will help identifying the site and its author after it is published.

Global Settings are different for Business and Personal category of websites.


For Personal category: enter your full name, email address, website name. Also enter
keywords and description of the website into the message boxes.


For Business category: enter your corporate email address, firm (company) name, logo image, slogan line, street address1,nd street address2, the name of your city, state, zip, phone and fax numbers.


In the Search Engine Keywords box enter the words or word combinations that distinguish your site from all other sites on the Internet. They will be helpful when somebody tries to find your site with a search engine. Think of the words that would be most characteristic of your site.


In the Search Engine Description box enter a short description of your site, like an answer to the question: What is it about? If an Internet user finds your site with a search engine, this description will show right under the site name.


At this point, you are done with general site settings. Click the Next button to configure individual pages.

Website theme / effects


Add themes and special effects! Make snowflakes fall down

in the browser, add logos that stay put as the user scrolls, and tons of other cool features, all with easy point and click selection.


There are several check boxes to indicate and select the theme (javascript effects) that you can see on your web page. Use pull-down menu for selection. Then, click Next to preview.


Falling Things:


  • Snow—the snowflakes will fall on your screen;
  • Snow 1 – just the same action but another type of snowflakes;
  • Leaves – the leaves will fall and fly on your screen;
  • Angels – the same actions but Angels (instead of leaves) will fall on your screen.


Items. Please use pull-down menu to select the number of snowflakes (leaves).


Theme 1. Here you can include the “Top down curtain” effect. Try not to include too many effects.


Cursor pointer. Here you can select:
  • Cursor text. The name of the web page will trail the cursor.
  • Colorful tail. The colorful tail will follow the cursor.

    • Site logo. Specify where you want to place the Logo image.


    Logo duration. Specify how long you want the Logo to show on the page after it is loaded.


    Alt text. Enter the tooltip text—a brief message that will pop up next to the cursor when it stops over the Logo image.


    One Step Back   |   Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

    Load/Save website


    You can save up to five different versions of your site. Make sure the names

    you enter reflect changes between versions.


    Attention: Before retrieving a previously saved website, save your work! If you don’t save your current project, you will lose it. SiteStudio can work with only one site at a time.


    Warning: Starting over will delete ALL PREVIOUSLY SAVED SITES. To start a completely new site, you need to register as a new user.


    Note: Saving your web site will not publish it. To publish your site, click the publish link at the upper left-hand corner on the menu panel.

    Start Over


    Scrap all your pages with one click, and begin designing anew. Use this option

    only if you are completely sure. There will be no way to get back your current pages if you start over.


    This option allows you to delete all your web pages with ONE click and start to design from the beginning. Warning: You will lose your current site as well as ALL PREVIOUSLY SAVED SITES. Don’t use this function if you are not strongly sure!

     Refresh Images


    You would need to refresh images in the following cases:



    • If ImageMaker has generated images incorrectly or there were some errors while generating.

    • If your provider moved a user account from one box to another and refreshing helps to correct paths to images.


    To refresh images, go to the Site Settings menu and click Refresh Images.

     Change Language


    SiteStudio offers 2 interface languages to work with: Russian and English. To change language:



    1. In the Site Settings menu click the Change Language link.

    2. Simply choose necessary language from the drop-down box. Interface language will change right away.


    Keep in mind that if your website contains any pages, change of language can corrupt these pages.
    Therefore, you need to Start Over or delete all pages to change the language correctly.


    One Step Back   |  

    Go to TOC   |   Close Help Window

    Edit Security Info


    You can make your site open to general public or closed (secure). Secure sites

    are often used by multinational companies to communicate current information to its representatives worldwide, where e-mailing is not appropriate.

    To secure specific webpages, you should:

    1. Configure access groups and users in the Site Settings menu.
    2. Secure individual pages in the Page Settings tab of the specific page.

    To configure users or user groups authorized to access your secure site, click the Edit sec. info link in Site Settings:

    1. In the Add Users section click the Add button.
    2. In the form that appears, enter User Name, user Password and user Full Name.
    3. Click Next to proceed.
    4. In the Add Groups section click the Add button.
    5. In the form that appears, enter Group Name and choose the users to be assigned to this group.
    6. Click Next to proceed.
      Note: You can delete, edit and change the order of users and groups using the corresponding manipulation buttons.

    To secure individual pages, go to Page Settings tab (see Page Settings help section for details).

    Edit Info for Search Engines


    SiteStudio allows to edit description to robots.txt file. This file
    is used all over the world by search engines to
    find the match to the search request. Search engine robots check
    robots.txt file, which is a plain text file, in the root of each server.


    Robots.txt implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which allows the web site
    administrator to define what parts of the site are off-limits to specific robot user agent names.


    You can leave the following indexing information to the search engines:


    • Allow all: allows all robots (spiders) to index your site.

    • Deny all: denies indexing your site by robots (spiders).

    • Pages to deny: this option allows to deny indexing pages by robots.

      If it’s the case, go to the “Settings page” of the page you want to
      deny and select the option “Deny indexing this page by robots(spiders)”

    • Allow all known: allows only known robots to index your site.

      Here you can also add Additional files or directories to deny. Just enter the file or directory name into the input box.

    • Your own robots file: here you canspecify your own robots.txt file.

      If it’s the case, enter robots.txt data into the input box.
      You can also add Additional files or directories to deny. Just enter the file or directory name into the input box.

      • Make sure to click Next to proceed.



    Note: you can edit, delete and change the order of file and directory names that are to be denied.