Using A Custom Site Design

Using the Site Sculptor Add New Design wizard, you can create a custom site design from a Dreamweaver template or CSS Sculptor preset.

Each Site Sculptor site design is composed of a Dreamweaver template or CSS Sculptor design, and a navigation menu. When creating your design, you will have the option to define a separate template and menu for your Home page and Content pages.

The wizard consists of 4 steps:

Specifying Home Page layout

Identifying Home Page regions

Specifying Content Page layout

Identifying Content Page regions

 

Launching the Add New Design wizard

Dreamweaver menu

The Add New Site Design interface can be launched from the following locations:

  • WebAssist > Preset Manager

Requirements for Dreamweaver templates

You can use any Dreamweaver template that you have to create your Site Sculptor site. However, you may need to make some changes to the template, prior to launching the Add New Design wizard. The followng steps should be performed prior to creating your new custom site design.

  1. Create all the editable regions
    Site Sculptor requires a minimum of 3 editables regions in the template before it can create your new site design. One region for the navigation menu, One region for the main content, and another for the footer links. In addition, if you want other regions of your page to be included in the content management, you will need to create editable regions in your template for those as well.
    All editable regions in your template will be included in the content management.
  2. Remove an existing CSS Menu Writer (if necessary)
    If you created a CSS Menu Writer menu and inserted that menu into your template, you will need to remove that menu from the template to prevent any conflicts from occuring. As long as you have that CSS Menu Writer preset available in the Preset Manager, you will still be able to use that menu when creating your site design.
  3. Save your template within your site
    For the Add New Site Design wizard to detect your Dreamweaver template, you must save that Dreamweaver template in a Templates directory within your current Dreamweaver site.
    This requires that you define a site in Dreamweaver to the location where you wish to store your website's files. Go to Site > New Site... or Site > Define Site... to perform this task.