Web Site Maestro Manual

WEB SITE MAESTRO MANUAL

Web Site Maestro is the top model of a range of four website optimizers offered by Tonbrand Software. The four applications, in order of increasing features, are HTMLOptimizer, HTML-Optimizer Plus, HTML-Optimizer Pro, and Web Site Maestro.

Web Site Maestro makes your web files load faster by optimizing both HTML and script code such as JavaScript, Java, LassoScript, CFscript, VBscript, Jscript, PHP, ASP, JSP, CSP, TPL and CSS. It also optimizes JPEG images and PNG images. Web Site Maestro protects your original web files by creating a Duplicate Web Folder for the optimized files. Thus, it leaves your original files untouched. You should use your Original Web Folder for editing and use the Duplicate Web Folder for uploading. To optimize all of your web pages and JPEG/PNG images, select Entire Web Folder and press the Start Button. Within a minute or less all web pages and images are optimized and listed in the log. From there you can upload. When you have optimized your entire web folder the log displays a report showing the original size of your web folder, the total number of bytes saved and the total percentage saved, plus the average load and display time speed up percentage of your site. If your web folder contains files that are never loaded in the customer's browser, for example download files like myBook.zip, then the report shows two percentages saved, one for all files and one for web files. Of course, only the last one is relevant. Note that this report does not appear when Smart Handling - see later - is on.

Web Site Maestro also features Smart Handling, supports XML, and can handle web pages with any text encoding. Moreover, the program can also check your web pages for dangling tags, missing attributes and broken links. A built-in FTP/WebDAV Client enables one-click optimizing and uploading, also in secure mode. Synchronizing your website with your Duplicate Web Folder is one of the many available options. A summary of the functions of Web Site Maestro is presented next. After that are detailed descriptions of the features, menus, commands, and so forth.

SUMMARY OF FUNCTIONS

Web Site Maestro offers 4 functions: optimizing web files, optimizing and uploading of web files, checking tagged pairs and checking the validity of hyperlinks.

To start the operation you can select on the main window a file, a folder or your entire web folder. If you select a folder, you can choose to handle the folder recursively, i.e. handle all of its subfolders in one pass. If you select or drag the entire web folder, the operation is always recursive. Instead of selecting a file or a folder you can drag files and/or folders to the Drop Spot above the View Code Button. Dropped folders can also be handled recursively. Note that you can only drop folders that belong to any of your web folders loaded in Web Site Maestro.

1. Optimizing Web Files: The main function offered by Web Site Maestro is optimizing web pages and JPEG/PNG images. That is, it cuts down image size considerably and it saves space on your web pages by removing unnecessary characters and tags. Most HTML Editors add such things for their own purposes and to make the code easier for the user to read. On your website, such coding is unnecessary. Furthermore, it slows down load time.

2. Optimizing and Uploading Web Files: The second function offered by Web Site Maestro is a combination of Optimizing and Uploading in one pass. You can optimize and upload all web files, a single web file, or the ones you have "dragged and dropped". More details about this feature are presented in the chapter "Drop Window."

3. Checking Tagged Pairs: The third function is for checking the tagged pair structure of your original web pages. Dangling tags will be reported. IMG tags are checked for the presence of the Width, Height and Alt attributes. You can choose to add missing Width and Height attributes with their pixel values. AREA tags are checked for the presence of Alt attributes. You can also choose to add missing Alt attributes to IMG and AREA tags and attach an empty string or, for example, the string "FindMe" to enable you to easily find and replace a string by a more meaningful caption. You can perform this job in a separate, resizable text window and save the changes to the original file.

You may check prior to optimizing if any Alt, Width or Height attributes need to be added by choosing the "Check (and Complete) Tags" function. You can decide if you want to have this action performed on the fly while optimizing, by checking the "Add Missing ..." checkboxes in the Optimization Options section under the Optimizer Tab in Preferences. If you choose to add alt strings which are not empty, then you better not choose to do it on the fly while optimizing, to save you the extra work of manually copying the changes from the optimized web pages to the original web pages.

4. Checking the Validity of Hyperlinks: The fourth function is checking the validity of your hyperlinks. Your original pages are checked for broken "href" and "src" links. These are checked for the file to which they point. Links that start with "../" up to "../../../../../" are checked for their real path. Broken hyperlinks of the type