Getting Started with Spinsoft Website Builder

This section covers everything you need to do to create a web site from scratch using Spinsoft Website Builder. We will go through step by step, and indicate any further areas of reading from the documentation.

Spinsoft Website Builder - Concept & Flow

First we will outline the concept of how everything is structured to give you a better understanding while you are going through the steps.

The ultimate goal you have is to create a website that looks and feels how you desire. Each web site is made up of pages with their own content and uses a template for the look.

Website builder concept

Templates:

Templates control the visual aspects of your pages, and what special features they have.

The layout of your site (how many columns, header, footer, menu's)
The color of your site
Any background images, or heading images for your site
How your text is formatted (font, size, color, style)
How your links are formatted (font, size, color, style)

Templates also control special features to add to your site, and what these features look like.

Controls the look and style of your columns
Controls the content within these columns (panels and page content)
Controls wether your pages will show navigation menu's

You can setup as many templates as you like, but a page can only have a single template assigned to it. You might find you end up with three templates, and set one of these for each page depending where it is on your site, or the type of content it contains.

Our menu system is very unique, rather than automatically build a menu based on which page is a sub page of another page - we let you put your pages anywhere in the menu you like. Our Menu Builder allows you to easily build your entire site menu in minutes, and allows you to put custom links to external sites or any destination.

There are two navigation menu's available, Horizontal or Vertical. Whilst you build your menu using the menu builder, you assign it to the template in Template Design. This allows you to have the same menu structure accross different templates - but with different colors and styles.

Libraries and other sections

With our basic concept in hand, what we have done is split up the sections of your site to easily manage your content. Ultimately all of these sections contain objects which can be used in your page content and around the site.

Image Library: This is where you upload and store your images. These images can then be used in your templates and page content.

File Library: This is where you upload and store your files. These files can then be used in your page and panel content.

Panel Library: This is where you create and store panels, which can be used in the columns of your site. The panels are added with the column builder within your template.

Page Design: This is the where you put everything together, your text, images and files are all entered using a Rich Text Editor.

Template Design: This is where you design your template and build your columns. You can use images from the image library in many places here.

Menu Builder: This is our unique menu building system, to build the navigation menu for your site - based on the pages you have made.

This system is object based, meaning if you place an image object in a page and later change that image in the image library, the page will update with the new image. The same applies for files, panels, product and any item infact.

Time to build a site!

The best way to learn is by doing, so lets go ahead and make a site step by step! You can use these links or the navigation menu on the left to go through the step by step process.

Step 1: Uploading images.

Step 2: Uploading files.

Step 3: Create a page and enter the content.

Step 3: Build the menu.

Step 4: Design our template.

Step 5: Repeat to add any more chages.

You can find additional information on all of the sections by using the navigation menu on the left and selecting any of the items from help topics.

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