Fast Way to Recreate a Website
18th of September, 2008
This is one to staple to the wall:You can recreate a site in Freeway faster than you can clean up the imported code. Hands-down, the fastest production tool on the web.
- Make screenshots of each of
the major pages of the site. (This is assuming that the site is built
with some form of design templates, so that there is a strong
similarity among all second level pages and all third level pages, etc.
If you are dealing with a professional site, this is most likely true.
This means that one screen shot can stand in for all second-level
pages)
- (Optional) Open the screenshots in Photoshop or similar and ghost them back 50%.
- Create a new Freeway document to the size of your old site.
- Place
each screenshot on a separate page, cropping and positioning it so that
it acts as a full-page template. Lock the picture box so you don't move
it inadvertently.
- Using HTML and graphic boxes as
appropriate, sketch the layout right over the template. Set your
headlines in GIF text, drag and drop the photos from a browser window
into HTML boxes (so they'll be pass-through), copy and paste the text
from the browser (drag and drop might work, too). Do this once for each
major page-type.
- Once you have your templates
defined, delete your screenshots, and also take a moment to clean up
your text styles and set manual style sheets for all of your graphic
and HTML text. Then convert each of your pages into master pages with
Page>Make Master Page.
- Insert Pages (choose master as appropriate) and repeat as in step 5 above. Once you work out the proper arrangement of windows and monitors, you can get into a rhythm, and using this method, I once recreated a ~100-page site in three hours.