Welcome to our Newswire

Version 2.03 is now available and comes in three different formats.

A FREE 'Lite' version can produce a maximum 5 page website.

The standard CMS edition has the advanced design features turned off, which makes a robust way for non skilled users to handle their website's content without the risk or complication of upsetting the advanced features.

The full developer edition now has even more features and still provides the quickest way to create and maintain any website.

A popular new feature is the range of !--@group-- tags. Place the main group tag anywhere in your template and it will be replaced with the standard letter for that menu group e.g. A, B, C etc. This one simple addition is a very useful way of automatically changing the header image to reflect the content of that section of the website. Different stylesheets can also be called to give each section a different colour or perhaps show a background graphic that lets the user know exactly where they are in the site. www.bfpa.co.uk shows how changing the top graphic can make the image more relevant and the site more interesting.

Please let us know if there any other features or facilities you would like us to explain.

A common difficulty appears to be uploading the finished website from your computer to your ISP's website hosting. Often people forget to upload the picture and stylesheet files needed to make the site complete. The contents of the search directory also need to be uploaded the first time for this to work.

Straight2web's upload page has been kept deliberately basic although this sometimes makes it difficult to configure for every ISP. Because there are so many good, free FTP programs around we currently have no plans to upgrade this section but it you are having trouble then we recommend you try leechftp, which can be downloaded for free here http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~jdebis/leechftp/downloads.html

If you would like to discuss other technical issues then please drop us an email or visit our discussion forum at www.engineeringweb.co.uk/forum

Denis Kigongo had no previous website experience but after his first, increasingly large site www.experienceafrica.co.uk proved so successful, he decided to start a second one as well..

Lynda Shen is an accomplished web designer and has produced some nice sites with Straight2web. See www.browsersite.com and http://www.ebook88.com/freebooks/A1.htm. She's confident Straight2web reduced the time to develop these by 90%.

Let us know if you have an interesting site or experience you think is worth a mention. For those people still using the free versions we are offering a FREE upgrade to the latest developer edition to the person we consider has created the best website design using Straight2web.

Don't forget!

From October 2004 the new accessibility requirements for websites become a legal requirement in Europe. If you're not running Straight2web version 2.01 or over then many of the hidden tags required to meet this legislation may not be automatically created within your site.