Designing Your Website - 9 November 2009

PersonalWebKit is now completely free. We no longer sell the Registered version.

You can add or remove pages with a couple clicks. PersonalWebKit auto-links all your pages for you.

Change and customize your design with a few clicks.

Import, edit, and add effects to your digital camera photos.

Type and edit text as easily as in a word processor.

Import videos, music files, and office documents.

Upload your site to the web with one click*.

Windows^® 98, XP, Vista.

Designing Your Website
PersonalWebKit comes with several templates from which you will base your design on. Each template comes with different colors, banner backgrounds, and text styles. Some templates even allow you to use one of your own digital photos as a banner background. You will add your own text to the banner background to make your own graphical banner at the top of your website.

Use your digital photos in your web pages.
By using our Pictures Screen, you can easily import and edit any photos or pictures for use in any web page within your site**. PersonalWebKit will copy the file to your Picture Library, resize, crop, and edit your photo as your desire.
You can even add effects to your photo. If the photo is too dark, you can brighten it. If you want to adjust the amount of red, green, or blue, you can do that. Blur, sharpen, inverse, diffuse, and solarize are other effects you may choose to liven up photos in your webpages. More about photos...

Create Photo Galleries of your digital camera photos.
PersonalWebKit will take a folder of your favourite digital photos and create a tidy thumbnail gallery page in your website. Your website visitors can then select which display size photos they would like to see. It doesn't matter what kind of digital camera you have or what size the pictures are, our software will create copies resized specifically for your website design **. See how easy it is.

Import Video & Music files into your website.
Our software can will also let you import any video, music, or office files to share with your website visitors:

Videos you have saved from your digital camera.

MP3 music files.

Office documents such as MSWord docs or Acrobat PDF's.

Powerpoint presentations.

Computer files such a .ZIP or application installers.

Animated Quickstart Guide to get you started.
PersonalWebKit is NOT for professionals. It's designed for anyone with basic computer skills who wants to start building a website in minutes instead of hours or days.
It's designed for the average computer user. It's easy! But to make it even easier, we have included an Animated Quickstart Guide to step you through the main features and get you building your website.

Automatically links any new page
PersonalWebKit will never ask you where to save your files, or what page links to what page. Instead, it will Auto-link your new pages into an attractive navigation section on the top left of your website.

Web Publish Feature
All web design software works in pretty much the same way. You create all the web and graphics files on your own computer, then upload them to a web server using File Transfer Protocal (FTP).
PersonalWebKit has a built in Web Publish feature that uses FTP to transfer your website to your webspace once you have created it. Everytime you change or update your website, PersonalWebKit will publish the changes and updates with the click of a button.
You will need a webspace account to publish to, but most internet providers give you one as part of your service.

PersonalWebKit is FREE for the home user to build one website.
If you like our product and would like to build more websites, then you can purchase the full version. We do not ask for any personal information before you download the free version.

Typing and Editing Text

The Page Edit Screen is the first thing you'll learn while going thru the Quickstart Guide. The easy interface allows you to type and format text the same way you would in a word processor.

Paragraphs are created by hitting your Enter key, while line breaks are made by using both the Shift + Enter key, very similar to many word processors.

You can create list items like this.
And this.

Or numbered list items like this.
And this.

Adding Links

Adding links to other websites or to email addresses is really easy too. Just select the text you want to be linked, click the button on the toolbar, enter the website or email address, and a link is made.

Adding Photos

The Page Edit Screen is also where you will add photos that you have imported into your Picture Library. Using your digital photographs in your website is really easy and fun.

The Picture Screen is where you can import and prepare your own photos for your Picture Library. Your Picture Library is where your new web photos will be stored for you to add them to your web pages as you see fit.

If you own a digital camera, you know that the pictures it takes are way too big to fit into a web page. No matter. PersonalWebKit's Picture Screen has the tools to resize and crop your photos to a web format easily inserted into your web pages.

If your photos need to be rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, then there are tools to do that as well.

Cool Picture Effects Now if you want to have a little fun with your photos, then you have to check out the Picture Effects Palette.

Effects you can put on your photos include:

Smooth
Sharpen
Solarize
Inverse
Diffuse
Emboss
Red, Green, Blue color adjust
Brightness Adjust

The Pages and Links Screen allows you to Add, Remove, or change the order of your pages. You create a new page with the click of a button, then typing in the Linked Text and Filename for the page. PersonalkWebKit does the rest. Once you have created a new page, you can edit the text, pictures and everything else in the Page Edit Screen.

Each Page is Automatically Linked

As you create new pages, they are automatically linked to each other without the need to re-edit previous pages. The same if you delete a page, the navigation link will be removed form all other pages.

Every page in your website will form one link in the Navigation section at the top left of your website. Take a look at the top left of our website and notice the links "Editing Pages", "Adding Pages", etc.

Your website will have a similar placement to the links. There are no limits to the number of pages you can create, but common sense dictates that you wouldn't want to have more than 25 links or so at the side.

You can always delete a page, change it's linked text, or change the order of the links easily.

The Media Library is a dialog you can access throught the Page Edit Screen Toolbar. This allows you to share files with others from your website.

Want to share a few of your favourite music files? Easy. Just select some text in the Page Edit Screen, hit the Media Button on the toolbar, then browse to where your MP3 file is. PersonalWebKit will copy this file to your web directory and link the text to that file.

Video clips are just as simple. You should try to minimize the filesize of videos first however. Any files over 10MB are too big for general web use. If you have Windows XP, try using Windows Movie Maker to edit your home movies.
Then use PersonalWebKit's simple Media Library function to share your favourite video clips with anyone visiting your website.

You can also link to Word Documents, Adobe PDF's, or any other file that you want to share on your website.

PersonalWebKit allows you to create a your website on your local computer, then when you're ready to show the world, Publish it to your webspace.

Webspace? You already have it.

Webspace is a term referring to an account on a webserver that will host your website. Since you already have an Internet Service Provider, most ISP's will already include a certain amount of webspace for all their customers. It's part of what you're paying for.

Setting Up FTP for Your Webspace.

PersonalWebKit, like most web programs, uploads your website through a process called FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Your ISP will likely allow you to setup your webspace online, and that's where you will get the necessary settings to set up PersonalWebKit's Web Publish feature.
Once it's set up, you can publish your website with a click of a button anytime you make changes, add pages, or just want to change your design for fun.

The Photo Gallery is a feature new to PersonalWebKit V3.1. It allows you to easily create your own Web Photo Gallery from your digital camera photos.

A Photo Gallery consists of the main page which looks like the rest of your PersonalWebKit design. This page has "thumbnails": smaller versions of the full-size photos. The user can then see which of the "display" or full-size photos they want to view.
You can take a look at our sample sites to see a couple photo galleries.

Each display photo is embedded in it's own webpage and comes with navigation links. The links allow the user to go to the next or previous photo or back to the thumbnail page.

As with all aspects of PersonalWebKit, ease-of-use is paramount. Here's the 3 steps to making a webphoto gallery:

Create your gallery by giving it a name. This will become the name of the link and the page.
Browse to the folder on your computer where your digital photos are.
Choose from a few size options, then click the Create Gallery Button and sit back while PersonalWebKit makes copies of your photos, resizes them for the web, and links all the pages in your gallery.