Marco, your assumption that this was a sponsored post seems hostile in itself, because you doubt the author’s integrity. So don’t be surprised when the author directs you to that corner of shame :-)

My 1 cent.

And you know what? CSS is the hardest part. So many rules, all affecting each other, supported differently by different browsers, often with unforseen results. So unlike scripting, which is “do X, then do Y.”

I love the idea of cross-browser standards. I hate fiddling with rules for hours to make things work. If there are tools to speed up this part of hand-coding, I say bring them on.

P.S: The fact that the company behind this product has integrity doesn’t really have anything to do with the whole matter. Nobody including the people who wrote comments more hostile than mine suggested otherwise. I don’t think the code this tool produces is more ‘useful’ than the code produced by any other tool for ‘no budget’ productions. If it’s just to show other people a concept pretty much anything will do fine.

I’ll now go sit in a corner and feel ashamed!

No product can replace the skill of a web design and development professional; no automation tool will ever write markup as beautifully semantic as you or I might write on our best days. But this product could be useful to web design pros who need to build walk-throughs or quickly put together a working site for a client with no budget (such as a family member), and the company that made it has integrity.

Looking at the code examples produced by this tool I’d say it’s possibly better than what other automatic tools produce but I still wouldn’t use this code on anything including pro-bono work and friends and family work. The fact that it appears to be limited to a certain set of pre-made grids doesn’t help either.

If time or money are a constraint I’d rather use one of the tons of cheap PSD-to-XHTML services that are out there these days. You’ll probably get a better result and at least it’s human made.

Just my 5 cents.

I think it’s a great product. Like you said, it’s not something I’d use on my client work, but it looks great for a quick thing that needs to be thrown together if there are any budget/time restraints.

Thanks for sharing.

If that had been around four years ago, the bad website I had made for my childhood church could have been done in a quarter the time for the same amount of money, with significantly better results. Which I would actually be glad about, but I worry about the ability for young web professionals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when seasons professionals can knock a site out using this in short order — speaking of course as one of those young web professionals.

Released Wednesday, August 27th, SiteAssist Professional creates entire CSS-based websites in minutes

Oh no, my decade+ of HTML/XHTML/CSS experience has been instantly commodified!

While I wouldn’t use SiteAssist Professional to design sites for my clients, I

Phew!

(from my tongue, in an undisclosed location somewhere in the vicinity of my cheek)

SiteAssist Professional works with Dreamweaver templates and imports from Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor and CSS Menu Writer.

If you’ve got a Dreamweaver template, you only need to make sure there are 3 editable regions: one for navigation, another for content and a third for the footer links. If you’re working with CSS Sculptor layouts, these will be included already. One of the coolest things about the program is that you can after you’ve applied a template design, you can quickly go in and try another one and all your added content will be preserved.

Not sure what you meant by “Me not to change CSS?” but just to be clear, you can modify the CSS for any kind of site created with SiteAssist Professional.