Operation Manual

Previewing, Publishing, and Maintaining the Site 93
It’s time to rehearse the final phase of preparing your Web site! In this
previewing and publishing phase, as we’ve mentioned, WebPlus takes
the project‘s pages and converts them to HTML and graphics (images)
so that a Web browser can display them. You can publish either to a
local folder or to an Internet-based Web host. Previewing is similar to
publishing locally, except that the exported files are temporary,
intended for immediate viewing in your own Web browser.
Optimizing the site
Before you preview or publish, it’s wise to
take advantage of built-in WebPlus tools
for checking your site’s content and
structure. You can run the Spelling
Checker Wizard, Proof Reader Wizard,
and Thesaurus to inspect and improve
your text. The Text Manager displays a
list of all the text stories and free text used
in your site, and the Layout Checker
Wizard can locate problems like orphaned
pages, invalid anchors, overflowing text
frames, or nonstandard fonts. You’ll find
full details on these features in online help (see the table at the end of
the chapter).
Previewing the site
Previewing the site at least once before actually publishing it is
essential. Only by viewing the pages in a Web browser can you make
sure that headlines and body text appear the way you intended, page
elements fit properly, animations play at the right speed, and links
between pages make sense.
If you’ve been following the hands-on sequence, you’ve had several
opportunities to try previewing the template-based site, both in an
external browser and in an internal WebPlus window. Internal preview
means that WebPlus must re-export each page whenever it’s displayed,
in case any page elements have been updated. For a closer simulation
of the user’s actual experience, you can preview the site in an external
browser, which can be any browser installed on your system.