Site Spinner V2 Review

From a developer's point of view, after using SiteSpinner, I am only left with my head spinning.

SiteSpinner started off on a bad note, the installer was quick and seemed painless. However, after launching the program and trying to create a new project, I got a critical error, it was unable to open my Temp directory: \Local Settings\Temp\SiteSpinner V2\Preview. Once I manually created this folder, it was smooth, and now it has fixed itself to recreate the folder itself if need be.

Although it's easy to do simple tasks like add text or graphics to a page, some of the other tasks are counter-intuitive. The buttons are non-standard. Viewing code, for example, you would think to hit the "Code" button in the left sidebar. However, that opens a blank code editor. To open the code editor, you need to use the ALT-C shortcut or File->Display Code. Once the code editor is opened, you can't resize anything in case you want to extend the code viewer or the web page. Furthermore, you can't edit the code, which is a major inconvenience if you want to make a quick fix.

The menus are a little cluttered as well. I would've expected to find the view code in the "View" menu instead of the "File" menu, but that's just me. The preview page buttons consist of a play button and a fast forward button. That took me a while to find. It did display in the browser nicely though.

It was nice to see undo and redo functions in SiteSpinner, which is key for web design. It remembers a whole history if you want to undo many changes.

The special effects options were easy to implement. You can easily hide something when a user goes over an object with a mouse with the Special FX->Mouse Over menu option. All the javascript code is created for you.

The table tool is reasonable. It lets you easily place a table on a page, customize all the table properties. The only downside I saw was it was a little difficult to enter text into the table directly. You had to create a text object separately, then drag and drop it into a table cell.

Overall, SiteSpinner seems more targeted for the ultimate novice user. It takes care of a lot of simple tasks for creating a web page while doing things behind the scenes. For the advanced users who like a little more control, this software will be difficult to use.