The second step is where you can specify the layout of your site. It
works by asking you to divide your site into the main areas of
interest, and enter them one-per-line into a textbox. These areas
will become directory-names, and form a major part of the website. (of
course, you can always change stuff later, in the main window)
This is the main window, showing how the list of areas we entered
gets turned into a website layout. The "Home" box represents the
main entry point to your website, and acts as the index and navigation
point. The 4 main sections of site have been given a page each,
while the thick red lines indicate "...is a subdirectory of..." (I'll explain this later)
Here we add some more pages to the photography section, telling the
program that we have 3 pages of photos we want to add, and could it
create the web-pages for us please. Right-click on the background
to add pages, then right-click on a page and rename it. Each page
is given a new box. while the thin red lines indicate "...is a new file in the same directory as..." (again, read-on for details)
As an interesting aside, there's a shuffle
command, which tries to move the boxes around to reorganise them.
It tries to push apart nearby boxes, whilst pulling each box towards
the pages it links to. Can be quite useful if you've just
imported a massive directory-structure and need to organise it!
To create the website, just use the 'create' button. You will need to have specified a place to put the website on your local disk (and the program crashes if this directory doesn't exist, so save the layout first!)
xWebDev will take your site description, and use it to create a set
of HTML pages at the specified location, giving them all navigation
bars and stylesheets, and linking them together as specified by the
links in your design.
See the website created using this sample project. This is the standard output of the program, which you can use as a template, and fill-in the content for each page.
The red-lines in the diagrams above help xWebDev to create the site layout given just your sketch. It needs to know where to put each file, and which directories to create. To do this, you specify the site layout using thick links "create subdirectory named x", and thin links "create file called x in the current directory". xWebDev takes this information, and uses it to build a directory structure, placing each page in the correct directory,
Of course, you can also create simple links, which have no effect on file-placement. These are indicated by a dotted red line.
Every page except the home-page must have a solid-red line linking
to it. xWebDev will try to warn you if the structure is
inconsistant, and it tries to detect circular links, but you should
take care always to specify a consistant, logical structure, otherwise
you'll end up with a site which can't logically exist!
2003, Oliver White. This document released under your choice of the GNU Free Documentation license, or the Design Science License
