Hi and sorry if this is the wrong place to post.

I'm going to be creating online guides and the one below uses lots of nice background images to decorate the text.
*****Link removed by admin*******
Just a bit confused if I could build something like this with coffeecup and if so, what version would be the best for me?

Look forward to hearing back soon, Pete

Welcome to CC, Peter.
What software to get depends on your experience and what you want the end product to be. Do you write your own code or do you prefer WYSIWYG software?
Will these guides be pages of a website? Or will they be PDFs available through a form or link? Will users want to print them? As for on-screen, should they be viewable on any device (phones, pads, tv, etc.)?

Great, thanks for quick reply.


I prefer WYSIWYG


They will be pages on a website, but I would also like for downloadable pdf's to be available as an added bonus, but not essential.

Lots of people will be looking on mobile and ipads, so it would be great if the pages could be viewable on all these.

Thanks again.

Visual Site Designer (VSD) is WYSIWYG and easy to get going with. It does use fix positioning, so it can't create responsive sites. You could make a separate mobile version. Adding links for your PDFs is simple and you can get a site up and running pretty quick with it.

If you've had a look around the forums, you may have seen mention of a new program – a responsive version of VSD. It's not available yet, but if you'd like to get familiar with responsive design, you could grab a free trial version of Responsive Layout Maker and give some of the sample layouts a try. It does require some knowledge of HTML/CSS, but it allows for easy construction of a responsive framework you can then export to a text editor to place your actual content into.
The new Responsive Visual Designer will have a similar look, but won't require the coding or export for editing.

All CC software has free trials, so take anything you're interested in for a test to see if it works for you. There's also plenty of help available here to get you off to a good start.

I use GIMP, which is a free image editing and creation software, to create images I want. It's basically photoshop minus the $900 price tag. The great thing about GIMP is that it is totally free, and if you ever switch computers or go out of town you can just download a new copy without licensing issues.
Then use visual site designer or HTML editor to place these custom images where you want in your website. Remember google can't read images so if it's important text for SEO, don't use a big image for it.

If you want to create a guide people can print out easily, then re-use these images in downloadable PDF's, such as logos and decorative text.

The easiest way I've found to do make downloadable PDF's is to use free a MS Word -to PDF generator. First lay everything out in Word and then convert to PDF. Then upload the PDF to your site so people can print it out. I think PrimoPDF is the one I use, can't remember. It's the free one and doesn't add a watermark.

Remember, you want to create your original images in large size, decently high resolution ~ 300 dpi. Then scale down to the web resolution, but always keep a high-res copy, for example of logos, so that you can use the high res image in brochures, printed guides, printed letterhead, printed cards and etc. If you are planning to publish these images in magazines then your resolution has to be even higher. Never use low 70-90 dpi web resolution images on printed items, or else it will come out grainy and cheap looking. And never use high 300 - 600 dpi resolution images on your website, or else it will take forever to load, and some cell phones will timeout and refuse to load them and your site will display wrong, missing large background images and things like that.

Keep your original image files in ~300 dpi high res most of the time. Then save a 2nd low res version only for website use. But embed the higher res versions in downloadable PDF's or Word doc's so that its a sharp, classy print out when they download and print it. It will reflect professionally on you.

As for a website viewable on cell phones and tablets, I am just now experimenting with the new Responsive layout maker. I have to say I find it difficult, and LOVED the old HTML editor and VSD much, much better. But this seems to be the direction technology is moving in, and as we learned recently that 50% of our website traffic is from cell phones this year, and our html site breaks and becomes unreadable on certain size phones, I'm in the process of re-doing our entire site structure in responsive.