SiteStudio is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) program produced by Parallels Plesk under their subsidiary company, Positive Software. With SiteStudio, HostGator users can quickly churn out eye-catching web pages with just a few clicks of their mouse button.
One great feature of SiteStudio is that it is a web browser-based application, meaning that any Hostgator user can log on to the Internet and create their webpages regardless of whether they’re at an Internet cafe or if they are using their own personal laptop at home. SiteStudio is particularly recommended for HostGator users who have no experience in web programming and have yet to learn how to use image editing software such as Photoshop.
Step 1: Select Your Website Category
The very first thing you need to decide on is whether your website is going to be meant for personal or business. Once you’ve selected either one of these categories, you are then prompted to select the layout template and color scheme of your website.
Step 2: Select Your Website Layout
A preview of what your potential website will look like is depicted on the right side of the window and the view automatically changes accordingly to the different colors and themes that you select on the left side of the same window.
SiteStudio comes with a large database featuring 80 layout templates (21 layouts for personal websites and 69 layouts for business intended websites). The best thing about these layouts is that they also come with preset images and that saves you from the time consuming task of sourcing and editing suitable graphics for your website.
Step 3: Enter Details about Your Website
If you have decided to create a business website, you will be asked to fill in:
- Your Company E-mail Address
- Your Company Name
- Upload Your Company Logo
- Your Company’s Slogan
- Your Company’s Address
- Your Company’s Contact Details
- Suitable Keywords for the Search Engine
If you have decided to create a personal website, you will be asked to fill in:
- Your Name
- Your E-mail Address
- The Name of Your Website
- Suitable Keywords for the Search Engine
Do note that this step is not mandatory, so you can opt not to fill in any of your details or only fill in details that you feel is important. For one thing, information such as the name of your company or the name of your website surely is much more imperative than filling in the full address of your company. You can always come back to this step and revise the information later on too.
Step 4: Choose a Page to Create
There are over twenty types of pages you can create with SiteStudio, including:
- A Humor Page filled with Jokes you can either select from the SiteStudio database or input your own joke
- A Survey Form to help you collect information from your site visitors
- A Calendar Page detailing relevant Important Dates
- ICQ Contact Center
- Driving Directions to your Location
- Amazon.com Web Store
- A Page containing your resume
- A Page containing Internet Links
- A Site Map of your website
- Photo album
If you’re feeling overwhelmed about which page you should first begin creating, our advise is that you start off with your ‘About’ page as this helps gives you a better picture of what your website purpose is.
Step 5: Input Your Content
Assuming that we’ve started out with the ‘About’ page, you will then be prompted to key in:
- The Title of your page
- An Introduction that explains what your website objectives are
You can also upload a personal photo to go along with your page as well.
If you would like to add a little more character to your Introduction, launch the full screen rich text editor which will allow you to change your font color or type, add links as well as entertaining emoticons.
Remember, SiteStudio is a browser-based text editor which also means that you can freely copy other font styles and formats such as tables and bullet points from other web browsers or Office applications and paste it directly into your SiteStudio page.
SiteStudio comes with an auto-save function, which means that everything that the you do is automatically saved periodically. If you have writer’s block, feel free to promptly log off and return to right where you left off when you finally have the inspiration.
Step 6: Well Done!
Congratulations on completing your first page on SiteStudio! All you need to do now is to add other pages such as a Photo Gallery Page, a Resume or Company Profile and a Welcome Page in order to create a more complete website. Alternatively, you can also create your own custom page too.
In case you get confused about which pages you have already created, navigate between the pages you’ve built using the ‘Sitemap’ and ‘Order Pages’ on the top of your SiteStudio browser window.
Your Content is Safe with SiteStudio
If you can’t decide which website template you like best, consider saving different versions of your site before you decide on which pages should be published. Even though the template of your page has changed, your content is stored separately. Hence, feel free to sporadically change the outlook of your web pages without worrying of having to retype everything all over again!
SiteStudio is free for all HostGator users, but it runs the danger of being overly simple for the more advanced web designers to appreciate. For one thing, while the templates and instructions make website creation a breeze, the structures of the web pages are rather rigid as well.
If you’re looking for a more advanced web building tool, do consider SiteBuilder, which is another free application available to all HostGator users.
