What is SiteStudio and how to use it

SiteStudio is a visual website building tool integrated within your Web Hosting Control Panel. If SiteStudio is included in your web hosting plan, you can access it from the Web Tools > Site Studio section of your Web Hosting Control Panel. If it's not included, it could be added as an upgrade (read this article for further information: How do I upgrade my hosting account?).

To start creating a website with SiteStudio, use the automatic login option that the Web Tools > Site Studio section is offering. Once you have logged in to SiteStudio, choose the type of website that you want to create - a "Personal" or a "Business" one. Please keep in mind that there is a slight difference in the pages, which you will be able to add for the different website categories.

Once you choose the category for your website, you can select a template - there are many templates, which you can choose from and most of them offer different color gammas and layouts. Following the wizard you will be able to set the name for your website, enter your contact details, etc. We have prepared a short step-by-step tutorial for creating a simple personal website using SiteStudio. The tutorial will teach you the basics about working with SiteStudio:

Once you log in to SiteStudio, select "Personal" for the category of your website and on the next step choose the desired website template and its color. On the third step, type your name, e-mail address (the mailbox should be hosted in your account with us), the name of the website. If you want you can additionally add the keywords and the description which will be used by the search engine crawlers. Of course, you can edit this information later through the "Site Settings" menu inside the "Change global settings" section.

If you want your website to have a simple intro page, you can add "Splash Screen" or "Flash Splash" (some of the templates do not offer such splash pages). You can add a few more pages to the website before managing them, for instance "Resume", "Album" and "Survey" pages.

Now, if you click on the "Site Map" menu, you will find all the added pages with three icons for each of them - Edit, Settings and Delete. You can edit the content of every page by clicking on the "Edit" icon. There is a "Launch full screen rich editor" link for the paragraphs of most of the pages. The rich text functionality is a "WYSIWYG" editor (What You See Is What You Get) and you can use it with most web browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari etc. However, Internet Explorer 8 has compatibility issues, so we recommend IE7 or Firefox.

Via the Settings tab, you can change the file name for each page, the font, the color, the meta tags, the page description and more. There are some requirements for picture upload in SiteStudio which should be mentioned as well. The recommended image size is about 100 KB and 400x500 pixels. It is important that the image file name does not contain any spaces, otherwise it will not be possible to upload the image successfully.

Once the website is already completed, you must save the SiteStudio project. Please note that there are no automatic backups for SiteStudio-based websites and projects and the only way to back up a website project in SiteStudio is to save it using the "Load/Save website" option in the "Site Settings" menu. In order to publish the completed website, click on the "Publish" button. The website building software will generate the website in your account and it will become visible online.