The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Internet/Intranet 
Design Shop Gold 4.2
Bernadette Houghton
bernieh@iaccess.com.au

Internet/Intranet Design Shop Gold (IIDS) is a Web authoring program which will appeal to those who prefer the visual approach to laying out Web pages. While primarily a Web design program, IIDS also enables you to create cards, posters, calendars and other graphic projects. For a so-called entry-level program, it has some surprisingly advanced features, including Java and CGI scripting, database connectivity and frame support.

IIDS ships with 60 templates that you can use as a basis for your own designs. It supports HTML 3.2 and 4.0, and you can add your own HTML code if you need a feature which IIDS doesn't support. As well as Java applets and scripts, IIDS accommodates embedded sound, videos or animated GIFs, forms, tables (including nested tables), artistic text and much more.

IIDS comes with a hefty collection of supporting software, including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, SecurePay WebShop (an e-commerce program), Apache Server (Web server), MGI Photo Editor, GIF Animator and CPIC Multimedia Thumbnail Cataloguer. A second CD contains 45,000 animations, sound, music clips, photos and videos that you can insert into your projects.

The basics

You access and design your site through one of the Site Manager's four windows:

  • Physical Layout, which displays the files and resources of your site, much like Windows Explorer
  • Logical Layout, which displays the pages of your site in hierarchical form
  • Navigate Layout, which presents a bird's-eye view of your site's pages, links and other resources. This view is useful for checking links and ensuring there are no orphan pages or resources
  • Header/Footer, where you create headers and footers for use in all or selected pages or frames.


Figure 1  Choosing a templeate


Figure 2  Setting the look of your pages

As with most visual design programs, you assemble text, images, links and so on onto your pages in a largely WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) environment. You can assign fixed or relative links, and choose a common look and feel for each page or group of pages. IIDS has its own internal browser for previewing your work, but you can choose to use any external browser of your choice. Once your site is finished, you generate the HTML and resource files (GIF and JPEG images, Perl scripts, links and so on) then upload the site onto your server using IIDS's built-in FTP capabilities.

Navigation bars

The Navigation Bar Generator automatically creates navigation bars to your specifications, complete with pagesensitive links. You can place these on any or all pages, and assign different looks for different groups of pages. In practice, I found the Generator quick and straightforward as long as I was willing to accept its defaults. Beyond this, I encountered limitations. For instance, I couldn't create a HomePrevious-Next-Last series of buttons with automatic page links unless I put up with a rather useless Self button pointing to the current page. If I tried to create it with the Generator's custom tool, I lost all page-sensitivity. I ended up having to create a separate navigation bar for each page without the Generator's help.


Figure 3  The Site Manager


Figure 4  Setting the look of your pages

Frames

You can break your page up into as many frames as you wish and arrange them any way you want, whether horizontal, vertical or nested inside another frame. If you use a frame as a navigation window, you can display the frame on each page of your site, or just on the main pages. The design process for frames is pretty much the same as it is for ordinary pages, although creating links is slightly more complicated. Frame Source overlays--the information inside the frame--can be embedded into a page or can be an ordinary link.


Figure 5  Inserting an image


Figure 6  Inserting a table

Database support

ODBC support enables you to connect your site to a database (or multiple databases) on your server and have user input into your site automatically inserted into the database. Alternatively, you could add a query function to your page and have the results of the query displayed on the user's screen. IIDS automatically generates the CGI scripts for these instances, but you can write your own scripts also. IIDS will import Microsoft Access databases directly, but you'll have to specify the structure of other types of databases yourself; a Database Wizard walks you through this process.

Slots

If you're creating a site with different text or images on the same place in every page, you'll find it much easier if you create templates with placeholders for these objects--or, in IIDS terminology, slots. In this case, IIDS remembers the type and size of the object and reserves the space for it. When you want to insert the object, you just double-click on the slot and IIDS opens the appropriate window, e.g. the Image Library.


Figure 7  Creating frames


Figure 8  Creating artistic text

Documentation

IIDS has plenty of documentation--there is a Quick Start Guide, User Guide (in hard copy and electronic format) and the expected context sensitive online help. However, the overall quality is poor. I found it difficult to find information as topics are scattered in different places, often covered only superficially, and badly indexed. The User Guide is full of grammar and spelling errors, and the thumbnails of the toolbar buttons often don't match with what is on the screen. This, combined with their inconsistent use (sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not) makes it hard to follow the tutorial. However, if you manage to work out which buttons to press, the tutorial is very good and offers an excellent introduction to IIDS.

Assessment

IIDS is a nice program with some powerful features, but I found it not at all intuitive. The toolbar buttons, for example, aren't arranged logically, and there is no drag-and-drop support for outside programs, even those bundled with IIDS. It took me a while to work out how to use some features not covered in the tutorial, and the documentation could be much improved. On the other hand, the whiz-bang features such as automatic navigation bars, frames and database connections are surprisingly easy to use.


Figure 9  Using the Navigation Bar Generator


Figure 10  Some of IDDS's graphics displayed in 
CPIC Thumbnail Cataloguer

Verdict

Suitable for small businesses with a tight budget who need some high-end features such as database connectivity.

Reprinted from the July 1999 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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