Introduction to Sandvox

Full transcript for this screencast is available at http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/screencast_transcript.html This is the text for Chapter 1: A day in the life… Hello and welcome to this screencast Introduction to Sandvox, the powerful, playful and intuitive website creation application from Karelia Software. In this screencast I’ll be showcasing many of Sandvox's creative features. To get started, I’ll show what it's like in the "day in the life" of a Sandvox website. Here on the Desktop is my Sandvox document. Let’s open it. This is a website I’ll build from scratch later, one that recounts my family’s summer trip to Ireland. For now, to get an overview of how Sandvox works, let's add a new page, make some simple edits, and publish those changes. This main document window is how you'll work with most aspects of your site. At the top we have a standard Mac OS X toolbar with icons to help us add pages, create links, and so on. Here on the left hand side we have our Site Outline, which shows all the pages of my site; the home page is at the top. The rest of the window is the WebView, which shows us the content of whatever page we have selected in the Site Outline, just as it would look in the Safari web browser. The first thing I’ll do is edit the content of the “about” page, which explains the purpose of this site. I’ll select “About” in the Site Outline. Now it displays that page in the WebView. To start editing, I click on the area of the text I want to change. For this page I’ll just remove a paragraph, and add another in its place. Then I’ll work in some basic styling. I’ll select some text and make it bold by selecting “bold” from the Format menu Next, I'll add some hyperlinks. I want to link the word “pictures” to the photo album I created, so I highlight that text and click on "Create link" in the toolbar. A little panel opens up. If you want to link to another website, you would type or paste in a URL . But since I need this link to go to another page on my own site, I drag this target icon to the site outline, and connect it to the page I want to link to. To close the link panel I click in some other part of the window. Notice when I hover over that link, I see where it’s linked to, down on the status bar at the bottom of the window, just like in Safari. For my last edit, I’ll add an entry about my day trip to Blarney Castle to the weblog. A weblog can be thought of as an online journal; a collection of articles with the most recent entries at the top. Adding a new entry to an existing weblog is very easy to do. I’ll add a text page from the popup menu in the toolbar, and then type the entry directly into Sandvox. Now, with all of my editing done, I’m ready to publish, so I click on the publish icon in the toolbar. From Sandvox you can publish to any web host, or even your own computer. This site is already setup to upload to an FTP site. If you’re curious about publication settings, they will be reviewed in detail toward the end of this screencast. When uploading is finished, I can visit the site. There it is in Safari; and there are my changes. This covers what “a day in the life” of a Sandvox website is like. Over the next few chapters of this screencast we'll recreate this website in Sandvox from scratch, demonstrating how to: • Create a new site; • Manage content with pages, pagelets, and collections; • Add and manage a weblog as well as albums of photos and movies; • Setup publishing; • And look at some advanced features.