Review: SiteAssist Professional 1.0
Rating: 80
SiteAssist Professional 1.0 ($199; upgrade $99) is the latest update from WebAssist. If your goal is to quickly frame out an elegantly coded (if conservatively styled) Web site, SiteAssist Professional is worthy of consideration.
I reviewed SiteAssist 3.0 about two years ago, before “Professional” was added to the name. Its successor, SiteAssist Professional 1.0, released at the end of August 2008, remains a template-based extension to Dreamweaver (CS3 or Dreamweaver 8), but the version and name changes come from the fact that it has been entirely re-written to generate browser-agnostic CSS-based code, incorporate new and improved features, and bring the Mac version closer to feature parity with its Windows counterpart.
When Time = Money
There’s no question that any Web design tool that relies on templates and canned color schemes can’t compete with the creative work done by a competent developer with time, an eye for design, and coding skills. These will be the folks winning awards and pushing the industry forward with their creativity. However, not every site needs cutting-edge layout and graphics, and most clients want their pages to work across browsers, express their message in a visually appealing way, and hey, if you could get it done this week, that would be great.
That’s where SiteAssist shines. In addition to streamlining the workflow and improving general compatibility, SiteAssist Professional 1.0 incorporates hooks to some of the latest Web 2.0 technologies, including Spry and other JavaScript components. Not coincidentally, SiteAssist Professional 1.0 is also compatible with CSS Sculptor and CSS MenuWriter, other template-based Web design tools from WebAssist. [Editor’s note: If you’d like to see other WebAssist products covered on Creativepro.com, let us know in the Comments.]
Shall We Dance? The SiteAssist Five-Step
SiteAssist works within Dreamweaver’s metaphor: You must first define a new site to enable the SiteAssist Wizard interface (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Choose from one of 14 built-in site types, or create your own. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Once you select the basic framework for your site, SiteAssist’s next step is to allow for some modest customization (Figure 2). The variations are tasteful and follow textbook Web design guidelines. This makes for a nice-looking if somewhat familiar end result, which means you’ll have a functional, vanilla Web site that everybody knows how to use. For those of us who know more about design than we do about coding, the time saved by having SiteAssist do the heavy HTML and CSS lifting gives us the ability to tweak with images, colors, fonts, and layout to our heart’s content. For the serious coders, if the generally clean markup occasionally seems a bit overdone, remember that the goal here is to harmonize with as many browsers as possible, meaning SiteAssist has to look for the lowest common denominator in every case.
Figure 2. Live previews offer generous thumbnails for the index and one internal page so you can get a feel for what suits your fancy. SiteAssist’s Vista-like buttons might not sit well with Mac users. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Page Design
After you’ve settled on a general theme, it’s time to get specific. SiteAssist lets you customize every page of each section of your site. You can choose between multiple templates within each page type. For instance, if you’re building an online catalog, SiteAssist offers a variety of page designs for your product listings (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Within each site section, templates make it easy to build a site that’s thematically consistent but varies subtly between pages. Click on the image to see a larger version.
The features introduced in this version of SiteAssist are primarily aimed at bolstering its compliance with Web standards, making it work seamlessly across browsers, bulletproofing the navigation elements it generates, and streamlining its folder hierarchy when creating the files that will make up your site.
Flesh Out the Footer
The next step in the site-building process is devoted to fleshing out your site’s footer (Figure 4). From a visual standpoint, the footer is a very small page element, but in terms of usability, navigation, and standards, a footer is a key component of each page, well worth its own step. Items in the footer can be reordered according to your needs, and like the other setup options, each page linked to in the footer can have its own page type.
Figure 4. A good footer is a straightforward map to the important areas of your site. Click on the image to see a larger version.
Another argument for paying attention to footers involves search engine optimization (SEO). Your client wants people to find the site you’re building, and search engines play a crucial role in bringing in the desired audience. Every search engine ranks pages differently, but two common facets are that they catalog pages based on keywords and apply more relevance to pages that are linked to from elsewhere on the Web. Putting a brief, one-line mission statement in every page’s footer containing keywords relevant to your client will only take minutes to implement and could provide a dramatic improvement in the site’s search engine ranking.
Don’t miss the last step of the process on page 2!
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on September 22, 2008
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