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Chapter 7. Layout Window: Creating Your Own Design
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ShutterBug recognizes that the design of your site is very subjective and personal
preferences vary from ShutterBug to ShutterBug. Although a variety of themes are
available for different tastes, you may want your own unique look, especially if you're
designing a professional or business website. This is where the layout tools come in,
providing you with the option to easily create your very own design and achieve the
look you envision. With ShutterBug, you have choice. You don't have to be constrained
by the parameters of a canned theme; you have the freedom and the ability to create
something that suits your needs and taste.
We encourage you to try the layout tools. They comprise one of the most powerful
features in ShutterBug and offer added benefits over a more expensive, pro-web
authoring tool. Incorporating drag and drop functionality for positioning the main
elements, grab handles for resizing elements, and an intuitive tabbed interface with
control panel for editing elements, the design tools are easy to use and involve very
little learning curve. Discover the layout capabilities at your own leisure and experience
the leverage they give you in creating professional, personalized, and creative designs.
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What's Covered in this Chapter...
This chapter outlines what can be done to each element on the page, where to find
each layout tool, what the tool does, and how to use it. Modify or change the elements
and templates completely to create your own unique design; edit all the elements for
fonts, colors, backgrounds, size, position, borders, thumbnail size, navigation
attributes, slideshow properties; add Xtra box items (such as QuickTime movies, image
rollovers, etc.); plus many other items related to the design of your site.
What's Not Covered in this Chapter...
This chapter does not cover page customization, managing themes in the theme
library, and importing and exporting themes (these topics are covered in Chapters
6 & 9). The options for customizing your shopping cart, located under the Shopping
Cart tab, are covered in Chapter 10.
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Chapter Contents
Get acquainted with the user interface, the viewer window, the 9 tabs containing
the editing tools for each element, and how to select an element or Xtra box on
your page.
Setting the page properties such as background color, using an image for the
page background, using the bitmap slicer, page centering, and making
elements visible or invisible on the page.
Editing the text content for fonts, linked text settings, line leading, position and
size of text box, text wrapping, margins, text box colors and borders, and using
and offsetting background images.
7.4 Masthead, Page Title & Footer Tabs
Setting the size and position of each box, editing the font styles, colors, and size,
adding borders and inside margins, background images and colors for each box,
and how to include the "Created with ShutterBug" badge.
Choosing the orientation for the navigation menu, font colors and menu animation,
editing options for menu borders, margins, and background images and colors,
spacing and navigation format for group and album pages, sub-menu settings and
other related options.
Sizing and positioning options for thumbnails, collages, floating freestyle photos,
embedded link options, caption settings, photo frames and margins, drop
shadows, and many other options for presenting your photos.
Standard and freestyle slideshow positioning, fade transitions, looping, random
order and auto start settings, caption settings, text content and other elements to
display during slideshow view; top align slideshow pictures, slideshow controls
and font settings, borders and margins for the slideshow box, and borders/frames
for the slideshow pictures; creating a Before/After slideshow.
7.8 Xtras Tab: An Introduction
An introduction to using Xtra boxes, adding media files such as Flash movies,
QuickTime movies, and MP3s; adding HTML snippets and embedding external
HTML pages; adding Xtra text and image boxes; inserting image rollovers,
layered images, as well as borders, positioning and sizing of each 'xtra' box
added to the template.
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