Make the Best Use of SiteGrinder Hints

The “hint” feature in SiteGrinder is one of the coolest and most user-friendly parts of the program. It eliminates the need for learning how to work

Sitegrinder by Media Lab

with CSS, Javascript, HTML, or other “foreign languages” in the field of web design. By labeling the different layers of your design with hints, you are telling SiteGrinder how you want them to perform, and allowing the program to take care of the rest. I have built several websites by using SG and its hints, and I can tell you without reservation that it is the fastest and most efficient way to get the job done. What follows is a look at some of the most commonly used hints in the Sitegrinder tool kit.

Start With the Background

SiteGrinder will consider the bottom layer of your design to be the background for your web page. This is one layer that does not require a hint for SG. Simply putting it at the bottom is enough for the program to recognize that it is the background.  If your lowest layer is colored, then that color will be inserted as the background on your finished page. If you choose not to create a background layer, a default white background will be used.

Interactive Layers

Some layers of your design might be there just to provide visual interest for your visitors. The parts of your website where hints are most important, however, are the areas that have some type of interactivity. If you want buttons that change color, popups that appear when a mouse rolls across, or scroll bars in your text boxes, you will use hints to tell SiteGrinder how those elements should perform.

Hints are created by naming your layer and following that with a dash and a hint. The most commonly used hints in SiteGrinder are -button, -popup, and -rollover. They can be abbreviated by using the first letter of each one after the dash (-b, -p, -r). There are many other hints as well, including -link, -text, -hide, -graphic, -scroll, and -menu. You need to be aware that you must not put any spaces between the dash and the hint.

You can also use more than one hint for a particular feature. If, for example, you want to make a button out of your company logo, you could label that layer logo-button. If you want to make the button popup when a mouse rolls across it, use the hint logo-popup. SiteGrinder will recognize that both of these hints refer to the same layer because the name that precedes the dash is the same.

Creating Buttons

SiteGrinder understands that nearly every button on a web page is used to take a visitor to another spot in the site. Therefore, whenever you use the -button hint, SG will presuppose that it should be linked to something. If you make a feature called home-button, the program will assume that you already have a page named home, and will link to it. This saves you a lot of time because you don’t have to create the actual link. You can also use SG to link to other places on the web, even if you did not build them yourself.

Help Available

SiteGrinder provides excellent customer support in many forms. In the area of hints, the help is especially useful. For example, you can easily access a complete list of SiteGrinder hints in an online PDF called the Zero-To-Hero Guide. Reviewing this will give a new user a great overview of all the different functions of SG. When working within the program, help is always just a click away.

But the beauty of SiteGrinder hints is that they are really very intuitive. I learned how to use them within a few hours of starting the program, without the need for reading endless help documents and user guides. I’m sure that you will have a similar experience if you give SG a try.

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