WebBuild is designed to help you, the site designer, setup the skeleton of a web site and allow others to complete the content without the need for any skills other than file and folder creation and editing of text files.

All the files that contribute to the design of the web site should be located in the "design" folder and should contain the following:

• A site.properties file - see Site Properties for more details).
• One or more navigation properties files - see Navigation Properties for more details.
• A sitetemplate.html file - see The Site Template for more details.
• A "design" sub-folder - yes a folder called "design" in a folder called "design". Use this sub-folder to hold all your static files used in your site design e.g. css files, images (not the content images but the images that are part of your site design), javascript files etc (if any), and any other supporting files that are necessary for your site design. The entire contents of this sub-folder is coped to the "build/design" folder each time the software is run.

Each time WebBuild is run it performs the following:

• Checks if there is a "design" folder in the current directory.
• Loads the "site.properties" file in the design folder.
• Creates 3 log files (errors, warnings and log) in the current directory
• Loads any navigation properties files specified in the "site.properties" file.
• Checks that there are "build", "content" and "content\pages" folders.
• A navigation tree is constructed from the "content/pages" folder.
• Empties the "build" folder of all files (except those requested protected in the "site.properties" file.
• Copies the contents of the "design/design" folder to the "build/design" folder
• Copies the contents of the "contents/images" folder to the "build/images" folder.
• Copies the contents of the "contents/documents" folder to the "build/documents" folder.
• Uses the file "design/sitetemplate.html" as the template for each and every .wfc file in the "contents/pages" folder and generates html pages in the "build" folder.

It is in this last stage that the majority of the work is done with the result that the resulting build folder can be used in a site as it is, or used as part of a larger site. All the references to links and files in the folder are relative requireing no knowledge of the eventual location of the final location of the target site.