Site Spinner V2 Review

Site Spinner V2 provides users with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to build webpages and ultimately a website. However, while using this program it was difficult to determine the target audience. The interface was generally unfriendly and unintuitive, especially for beginners. In the meantime, advanced users will struggle to get positioned in right places; especially should there be overlapping objects. Anyone hoping to use Java, PHP, ASP, or any other programming language should not consider Site Spinner as an option.

For beginners, tutorials and guides were provided upon starting up the program, but needed to be previewed in the browser, which has to be figured out how to do so by the user. Finding specific properties on an object to change can be tedious and hard, as sometimes the only way to access those properties is by clicking an unlabeled icon sitting off to the side of a subwindow. Some property labels are misleading or unclear as to what they actually relate to. For example, putting a "Code" property on a text field is rather vague, as to someone used to web programming languages means that PHP (or whatever language) code belongs there. This is not the case, and it is more of a place where someone could add additional properties to the text field that may not have been included by the developers of Site Spinner. There also seems to be a lack of input cleansing, as a ">" put into the aforementioned "Code" property promptly breaks the automatically generated HTML.

Advanced users will also face their own set of issues. In trying to simply place right-justified text, a text field, and a submit button over a relative-sized colored bar, Site Spinner seemed unable to perform. I then tried using a background-colored table instead, still without luck. This seems like a fundamental flaw that you cannot place multiple objects next to each other inside a table cell. I believe this is because Site Spinner attempts to position everything on the page using CSS instead of table nesting. While this is not a bad approach, it should still allow two objects to sit naturally next to each other inside a table cell. Finally, there is no ability to directly edit the generated page source code which is necessary for advanced users.

There are some redeeming features about Site Spinner. The automatically generated HTML is relatively clean and easy to read, which is problematic for other web page creators. I loved the way images were created behind the scenes and automatically referenced, although sometimes the images were unnecessary, such as a solid color object or table background that could easily be done in a style sheet. Most of all, I enjoy the efficiency of the program. It does not take more than a second or two to load up and it only seems to slow down when previewing or publishing a large project.