SiteGrinder 3: The Latest Update

SiteGrinder is quickly becoming the best, most full-featured, and easiest way to design a website. If you know the basics of Photoshop, this really is becoming the only way to go.

SiteGrinder 3

SiteGrinder, from MediaLab, is a way to churn out pages for a Web site strictly through Photoshop — you do all the designing in Photoshop and the SiteGrinder application creates all the code for you. You don't need to know HTML, CSS, Java Script, or any Web site development application (e.g. DreamWeaver) to get started.

MediaLab have developed a couple of fantastic new features in SiteGrinder 3 (as well as a bunch of other stuff): One is the ability to install a shopping cart right from your development in Photoshop, and the other gives you the ability to edit your site directly from any browser. Really excellent stuff.

New Features

There are over 300 new features and we'd need a whole website just to go over them, but here are the highlights.

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Commerce

The Commerce Add-On lets you provide simple or complex eCommerce options to your customers, including "Checkout", "Add to cart", specifying quantities, selecting colors, and more. Created with buttons and forms, these items can look like whatever you want and can appear anywhere on your pages.

Working with the FoxyCart shopping cart, which supports a wide range of payment gateways, the Commerce Add-On gives you the ability to incorporate eCommerce into your website without additional expensive software or custom programming.

There are three ways to sell your products or services with SiteGrinder's Commerce Add-On:

Whichever option you choose, everything is designed right inside of Photoshop. With a few simple settings made before you upload your finished site, your beautiful design is transformed into a working online store.

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Control

When you create and deploy a new site with the SiteGrinder Content Management System (CMS), a secure admin page is created for the site. Simply log in with the ID and password you created in the SiteGrinder Content Manager, and you can instantly make changes to your site.

With the Control Add-On, you -- or your clients -- can perform all of these tasks on any computer with an internet connection, working in most common web browsers:

You'll never need to call a designer or programmer to help you if you need to change a few words of text, change the price of an item in your online store, or even if you need to add a new page or menu item to your site

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Key Features

Visit MediaLab's SiteGrinder site for more.

The site has a host of video tutorials to get you off the ground, free users manual, and a support community. There is a learning curve for SiteGrinder, as with all sophisticated software, but the rewards are quite excellent.

Free Photoshop Brushes

Visit our brushes page and get links to an amazing selection of brushes for Adobe Photoshop, including a preview of and links to Javier at Deviant Art. He has an enormous variety of brushes like Abstract, Fractals, Grunge, and many more. Another great source for brushes is psbrushes.net — they're billed as the largest resource for Photoshop brushes. And lest we forget, don't miss getbrushes.com — they are another source of an amazing number of free brushes for Photoshop.

Photoshop CS3 Resource Center

Download and purchase Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended from Adobe Labs and start enjoying the upgrades and enhancements of the program. For news, reviews, and articles on all things CS3, visit our Photoshop CS3 Resource Center, and for the latest CS3 tutorials, go to our CS3 Tutorials page.

Fluid Mask 2.0 — Special Offer — US$189

Order Fluid Mask through us and get a special discount — you pay only US$189 and you get 6 months of free upgrades. This offer is exclusive to photoshop-pro.com and to take advantage of it, visit our Fluid Mask Discount Page. To find out more about this software, what it does and how it does it, visit our Fluid Mask page.

As a short preview of this extraction tool (taken from their site), you might know that Fluid Mask is a highly advanced software tool designed to make life easier for everyone who creates cut outs. Built as a plug-in to Adobe Photoshop, Fluid Mask is the new next-generation cut-out tool. Behind the product is breakthrough technology that mimics the way the eye, optic-nerve and brain perform visual processing. It offers an intuitive, accurate and fast approach to cut outs. A key feature is the new Edge Overlay showing object edges within an image. Suddenly masking become a whole lot easier - it's now possible to select, group and mask objects in images to make great cut outs.

Alien Skin

Visit our Alien Skin page to get all the details of this most amazing software — how easy it is to use, how versatile the effects are, and how cheap it is!

SiteGrinder: designing websites with Photoshop

You don't need to know any code (e.g. HTML, CSS) or learn a new development application to make a great-looking website. With SiteGrinder, you use your Photoshop design skills and the site is automatically created for you.

In Photoshop, you do all the designing while adding relevant names to your layers. You then open SiteGrinder from the Automate menu in Photoshop, and build your site. SiteGrinder incorporates full functionality in the ability to create buttons, rollovers, multiple pages, email forms, menus, and more. What's nice about this product is that you can stick to all the creative stuff and let SiteGrinder grind out all the tedious code.

Free Photoshop Plugins

This one of our most popular pages. Go to our free plugins page to find links to the latest Photoshop plugins, information, and resources. You'll also find links to commercial plugins like Alien Skin, Extensis, Auto FX software, Xaos Tools, Photozoom, Photomatix, and many more.

Free Photoshop Actions

Check out our free Photoshop actions page to find links to the latest and greatest actions from sources like Adobe Studio Exchange, the Adobe Evangelists, Action Central, Action FX, and PicsToBits Actions.

You'll also find news about actions and an introduction to actions with links to excellent tutorials.

Recover Your Photos

Catastrophic disc failures are just waiting to happen. If you're not prepared, you may lose an entire life's work, but not now. Visit our Recover Your Photos page and discover a wealth of resources and links to immediately recover digital photo files from a catastrophic hard drive failure or a corrupted media card. For total hard drive crashes, check out DriveSavers. They specialize in providing expert recovery from HD failure. Also, get information on and links to PhotoRescue which is an extremely popular solution for recovering photos.

Can't Get Enough Fonts

Let's face it — you can never have enough fonts. Searching for good fonts is a past time of ours and we believe we've found some excellent ones.

Visit our free fonts page for an extensive list of links to font resources. We also have some links here to commercial font sites if you want to buy some.

Free Stock Photos

Contrary to popular belief, there are many places on the internet which offer free stock photos. If you are in the middle of a project where you need some, visit the page below for all the links.

If you're looking for stock images for free, visit our free stock photos page.

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Header photo credit

Photo used with permission of stock.xchng.