JBO Site Developer 2

Project Status: Development - Active Beta - N/A Release - 2.0.6. Build 46 Release date: 28.06.2007 See the bigger picture.

What is Site Developer?
Unless you are a professional web site designer, you will generally design and create your web site once, with a redesign perhaps annually. What you will do much more frequently is update and maintain your site, possibly more than once a day depending on the purpose of your pages. Site Developer is a small development environment in which you can easily and comfortably design, create, update, and maintain your web site.

What is new in Site Developer 2?
Just about everything! The user interface has been completely redesigned with visual access to files and directories provided to the left of the window, while everything behind the scenes has been recoded and rebuilt.

Why bother writing your own code?
There are lots of web site design and editing utilities available with prices ranging from freeware to facetious. Some generate the HTML code automatically and in most cases, do so quite badly. Such a web page will work reasonably well if uploaded without further editing. It will also be up to twice the size it needs to be and so may take twice as long for a visitor to download. If the user decides to tidy up the code (or better still, write their own), this can be done with any text editor, or more comfortably, in a purpose built environment such as Site Developer.

Where are all the gimmicks?
Many web utilities share in what appears to be an attempt to pack in more 'features' than their competitors. While the user will probably never need most of them, they do result in a large programme with large menus and multiple toolbars which must be waded through to find the few features which are actually needed. It all looks very impressive but is it what the user needs? We think not. Site Developer only contains features which we believe will be constantly used, and a help package to ensure you get the best from them. In our experience, simplicity and ease of use makes for a more pleasant development experience. Future versions will only have new features added if they are needed by those who use the product.

How do you learn HTML?
The two easiest ways are to visit www.w3.org and read about it, or to buy a book on the topic. Above all remember that practice makes perfect. HTML is a language which does not take a long time to learn and once the essentials are acquired, web coding becomes much more satisfying than 'choose, drag, drop, and hope'.

Where can you get a copy of Site Developer?
Site Developer 2 is available for download by following the link below to our download page. The current version is shown in the project details above. Site Developer 2 may also be available from various software libraries.

How do you get help?
A comprehensive help package is included with the release version of Site Developer 2. This may be accessed from within the programme, or independently from the link in your Start | Programmes list. The help package includes an HTML library which comprises a list of the permitted attributes for each tag, as well as indicating if a closing tag is recommended or required. For more information, some elements of the help package are available here.