How to Build a Website With Flux 3.pdf

7/27/2019 How to Build a Website With Flux 3.pdf

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http://designshack.net/articles/html/how-to-build-a-website-with-flux-3-a-coders-wysiwyg/ pg 1

How to Build a Website With Flux 3: ACoders WYSIWYGby Joshua Johnson on 22nd October 2010 with 37 Comments

Flux is a WYSIWYG website editor for Macs. Now, before you curseunder your breath about how much you hate WYSIWYGs, you shouldknow that Flux is different and is both powerful and flexible enough tobe used by professional web developers.Today Ill introduce you to Flux by creating a super simple web page fromscratch (no annoyingly rigid templates). Along the way well see what a typicalworkflow looks like and why it just might be the best visual web editor Ive everused.

Why Is Flux Different?When I think of a WYSIWYG website editor, two popular applications come to mind. The

first is Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a ridiculously powerful application, but has a learning

curve thats quite high. Its simply a huge application that may not be worth the trouble for

many designers who are already comfortable coding by hand.

The second application that comes to mind is iWeb. iWeb is fun for a few hours, but once

you realize how strict the template system is, the idea of using it for professional web design

goes out the window. Even its much far superior rival RapidWeaver still seems to push youmore towards preset designs and seems like its targeted towards web development

novices.


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So Dreamweaver is for professionals but has a steep learning curve and iWeb is for laymen

and has almost zero learning curve (and consequently zero flexibility), where is the happy

medium? Enter Flux.

Flux is a visual web design application for people that hate visual web design applications.The workflow has been carefully crafted to mirror the way you code sites by hand. The best

part: its completely flexible. There are some included templates but Ive never even really

bothered with them because Flux makes it easy to design from the ground up, just like I

would if I were writing out the code manually.

Enough talk, lets see Flux in action.

What Were BuildingBecause I want this to be a really basic introduction, well keep the design super simple. If I

get enough requests in the comments, I can write another more involved and advanced

tutorial but for now well stick with a basic one-page site with very little on it.


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Pretty simple right? It almost looks like one of the cheesy templates that come with thesetypes of apps but as I said above, well be building this from the ground up.

Step 1: Creating a New ProjectCreating a new project in Flux is a painless procedure. All you do is go to File>New and

youre on your way. It will ask you where you want to place the files and whether you want

Flux to automatically create a basic site structure for you. This includes the following:

index.html, main.css and an images folder. In this case thats exactly the format that I want

to use so I chose to let it set it up for me. If you have a different system that you like better,

you can do this manually.


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When you double click on the HTML file, youll be taken into the main Flux interface. As you

can see, theres a lot going on here. In fact, we could spend the entire tutorial just

discussing each button and feature. However, to make things less boring, well go straight

to the building and introduce features as they come up. I definitely recommend that you

download the demo and poke around the interface to familiarize yourself with it.


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Step 1: Styling The BodyIf you click on the big empty canvas area, you should see a box that becomes highlighted

with the word body in the upper left. This is the empty body structure of your HTML. The

first thing well want to do for our site is add a background to this element.

To do this, click on the Inspector button at the top (looks like a pair of binoculars). This will

bring up what is in my opinion, the heart of the app. Here youll create styles and define the

look for every element that you create inside of Flux. The output of the Inspector is CSS and

all of the controls inside are labeled with the CSS properties youre used to working with.


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Adding A Background Color

If we were coding this site by hand, the first step might be to designate a background color

for the body. Well actually be using a repeating image in the next step, but well want to

make sure the background looks right even if the image doesnt load.

With the body selected, well go to the Fill section on the left of the Inspector. From here,

applying a background color is as simple as clicking on the appropriate CSS property and

typing in our color; in this case #1f1f21.

Adding A Background Image

To add a background image, we basically take the same exact steps and simply navigate to

the proper file in the images folder. I used an awesome free background from Premium

Pixels .


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Step 2: Adding a ContainerTo add a container to a site, you would normally just throw in a div, and thats exactly how

things work in Flux. Click the Container button at the top and go down to Quick Div.

Make sure that when you do this step, you have the body element selected. In Flux, you

always want to select your desired parent object when creating a new element. This

ensures that it is inserted into the correct portion of your HTML.

This should create a little empty box with guides on your canvas.


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Just as we did before, select the element and open the inspector. Under Position & Size,

set the width to 700px and the height to 810px. Make sure to clear out the default values for

top and left while youre at it.

Auto-Centering An Element


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Now, if youre a web developer you already know exactly how to center this div: set the

margins to auto. You can go in and do this manually or simply click on the little gear at the

top right of the Inspector and go down to Auto Center.

Adding a Shadow

At this point you should have the basic frame for the site.

Just for fun, I want to show off some of the Webkit CSS3 features built into Flex. If you click

on Webkit in the inspector, youll see a handful of fun CSS properties: box-shadow, box-


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reflect, webkit transitions, etc. Unfortunately, there arent any Mozilla equivalents, but you

can always drop those into the code manually.

To add a shadow to our container, just click on the property and adjust the settings.

Inline Styles?Keen observers have probably noticed by now that the styles weve been creating are set to

inline. This is one of the quirks of the Flux workflow. For some strange and unknownreason, all of your styles are set to inline by default. Its actually a bit easier to setup

elements in Flux when they are set to inline so the Flux website recommends that you first

set up an element the way you want it in the manner that we have above, then convert the

styles into something that will appear in the external stylesheet.


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Fear not, this is a quick and pain-free process. Select the object you want to convert, right-

click on it and select the Create Style with option. This will bring up the following dialog

that will allow you to assign an ID or Class to the object.

Doing this will create a little icon on the left with the ID we just applied. This area is basicallyan outline of our CSS file. Now when you want to change the properties of that container,

youll double click on the icon here to launch the inspector.

Step 3: The HeaderThe steps we just learned lay out the workflow for creating all the content on our page. To

add the name of the company to our header, we create another Quick Div, but this time


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double click inside of it to type inside of it (this essentially creates a p tag). Once you type

out what you want, you can style the text however you like. As you can see below, Ive

added settings for color, font-family, text-transform, text-align and font-size.

Next, do the same thing for the text below the headline.


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That should give you a nice typographical header for your page. Remember to convert both

of these elements to external styles just like we did before.


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Step 4: The ImageNow were ready to throw in our big image. Ill use a photo that I shot myself but you can

anything you like.

To begin, select the container and create a div thats 700px wide and as tall as you need it.

Then set the background of the div to your image and the background to no-repeat. With

the image div selected, you can use the arrow keys to shuffle it up or down to move it into

position, after all this is a WYSIWYG!

Step 5: Finishing Off The TextAt this point the tutorial would be quite redundant if we went into too much detail. Theres

really not much left to do beyond creating a few more divs, filling them with text and styling

them like we did above. I stayed with the Georgia font theme I had been using and just

made my headline larger than the paragraph copy.


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If we want to look at and edit the code at any point, just hit Command-3 to bring up the code

viewer.

Flux spits out nice clean code that fully integrates with the development process. You can

do as much or as little as you want with the WYSIWYG interface and do the rest by hand.

Since Flux uses only plain old HTML and CSS files, you can even work on the site in your

favorite code editor as you build in Flux. The workflow is completely open so that if at any

point you just want to do something the way you always have, youre free to do so!

What Else Does Flux Do?This tutorial hasnt scratched the surface of what Flux can do. Heres a few other features to

get excited about:

Built-in layout modules for fast prototyping

Live Browser View

JavaScript, PHP, and all that jazz

WordPress Theme Support

Reusable Code Snippets

History Palette


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Widget palette Create easy galleries and jQuery effects

HTML5 Support

Google Font API Support

Tons more that I dont even know about yet!

Closing ThoughtsI first used Flux a couple of versions ago (Flux is now in its third iteration), and loved the

idea but wasnt crazy about the execution. It felt a little buggy (all that is fixed now) and

really didnt seem that easy to just pick up and run with.

However, that encounter was quite brief and Ive always wanted to go back and really give it

a proper run through. Ive played with Flux for the past two days and have to say that, once

I took the time to figure out the proper workflow, working with Flux was a dream. It definitely

takes a little while to figure out all the quirks but once you do they dont eat up any time at

all and feel quite natural.

At the very least, Flux is awesome for prototyping. Fans of designing in the browser instead

of Photoshop will see most of their concerns addressed here as you are forced to design

using actual CSS properties and positioning rather than Photoshop effects. My favorite partabout the app is that it doesnt corner you into using it through the whole process. There

arent any Flux project files to worry about, only the files you would normally use to build a

site. This means you can switch to a different app or even pass the project off to a

colleague or client who neither needs Flux or need ever know you used it.

If youre a developer who codes by hand that often dreams of a WYSIWYG that doesnt

suck and can actually plug into the way you currently work, I highly recommend that you

give Flux a shot. It can be a little frustrating at first, but take the time to push through thatand figure out how to really use the app properly and Ill wager that you might just think its

the best WYSIWYG youve ever used.

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