Workflow, best practices, choosing the best starting point..

New to the Extension Library, veteran of table-based design and still learning CSS. I've spent the last couple of days exploring the tutorials, solutions and training that comes with the library for design extensions - Sculptor, Menu Writer, and Site Assist Pro. Also, I was never a big user of Dreamweaver templates.

So -from all this information, it's clear that there's more than a few ways do build a website using these tools - from hand coding CSS to using a preset in SAP and/or sculptor and modifying same. Now I"m in the process of deciding which to use in building a new site - and which to start with.

I have a design in Photoshop. so that's set. The actual layout doesn't match exactly any of the presets in SAP, but a few are close. Same with those in Sculptor. It seems like I can edit from either one to get the layout I want, but is it better to create the layout in Sculptor and bring it into SAP? If that's the case, should I also create the template in DW first or let SAP do that?

Other than that in general, the only other real challenge I see is that my home page has a horizontal nav, which the inside pages will have vertical.

What would you say the best workflow would be for this project? Thanks!

I think that you should start out with CSS Sculptor to get your layout setup the way that you want it. Once you have created the layout in Sculptor you may want to craft a custom menu within CSS Menu Writer.

With that part done you should use your new Sculptor preset to create a new SiteAssist Pro layout. When you are crafting this you can choose one layout with a menu for the home page and another for the content pages, so having the horizontal menu on the home page and a vertical one on the other pages will work just fine.

When you do all that you can then run SiteAssist Pro to generate the site, this will create the template for you.

I agree…that seems a good way to go

Thanks for the replies! Yep, after reading this and doing some experimenting on my own I am seeing more of how these apps fit together. I am pretty sure I can customize my layouts exactly how I want them in Sculptor - I do have a couple of questions, but I will post those under that topic.

But there is one thing that I'm pretty sure I can't do in the interface - that's adding a "faux background" that scales to fit the browser window. I do have the div coding and necessary CSS to make this work - but where's the best place to add it in? I can import the layout into SAP then add it, or would it be better to make a template?

If this is a css setting that you can't apply in Sculptor then you should add it into the SiteAssist Pro template after the site is created.