Does anyone use C2 for web design?

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You can, but its not the best for seo. The content can't be seen by crawlers easily, although there are some things you can do to get them to read stuff.

Of course they really don't like people to do that.

Short answer: C2 is not intended for this, but programing by itself is "problem solution". You can make it but you'll lose a lot from doing so. I don't recomend C2 for this.

I actually used years ago, for a quick and dirty website that my company wanted to do. I could have done it in jquery with foundation zurb or other html framework, but since I had so little time to make(less than half a day), I picked my usb stick that I carried around with construct 2 and made it.

The big hits are that You'll have no way to track links for your otimizations, this of course means that as far as I'm concerned no search engine will be able to crawl the webpage.

Editing would also be no easy feat, since you have to export it everytime you change a little of the code.

You can't have CSS rules on any of the components(with some exceptions, you could also make construct read parameters from a file on the server, but since you'll be doing this, why even bother using C2? Jump straight to bootstrap or foundation's zurb.)

even without the SEO (search engine optimisation) problem, it is doable but not the best idea of the world, for a reason pretty similar to the fact that "flash powered websites" are never a good idea.

A website should be easy to edit, easy to read (html for the content, css for the appearence, javascript for client side interactions, C2 will use Javascript for all of that inside a canvas), light (the C2 runtime is not that heavy, but still), accessible (kind of the same as easy to read, but flash websites for exemple will not work without the flash player plugin, which is a limitation that is not needed really, C2 does not really have this issue thoug unless javascript is disabledh), take advantage of the full availiable space (letterbox scale will feel weird for a website).

Also doing a scrollbar, being sure to be able to use links correctly, having to wait for the initial loading of the website, all of those are issues that are not big sure, but may be bigger than just doing the website the intended way.

So I would recommand trying to go without C2.

Thanks all for the clear answers. Do any of you have any easy web-design software that you recommend?

Wordpress and a theme with a sitebuilder. Can't be easier than that and you can make it look really professional at the same time. Google wordpress suitebuilder and have fun

Anonnymitet said it. Wordpress would be your perfect companion.

But it is a complete solution. It will get you a complete website runing up in minutes. But you'll still have to mess with templates and stuff. For a newbie this can be overwhelming.

For software, I don't know... I personally don't like softwares getting in the way of my code. I generally do a rough sketch of what I want with gimp, photoshop, inkscape or whatever I have at the moment, and do all the codings(html, css, javascript) with notepad++ or geany following some best practices. It's more of a workflow than a software thing.

Never cared about dreamweaver. You can make some pre-built things but by the end of the day, you'll generally have to dive into the code, so I don't even botter using a dreamweaver-like solution.

I've been trying to make a website lately and hated Wordpress. It didn't allow me the customization I wanted, and I didn't want to have to try a thousand different themes to find one that was set up correctly. I am however new to Wordpress, and so possibly misunderstood how to use it.

Regardless, I recommend this: http://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com I just tried it and it's similar in feel to C2, has lots of great features, drag and drop placement, isn't too expensive, has a free demo and you can even incorporate a C2 game as an element of a page rather than using C2 for the entire page itself without too much difficulty.

In theory you could use C2 to make an app that can design a website.

It is just text after all.

I'm about to use it for my website, welcome screen (parallax scrolling page) but still working on it.

— - I noticed the parallax effect on the Airscape website. Do you mind if I ask what you used to construct the site and how you achieved the parallax effect? I like it.

http://www.weebly.com/

I've been trying to make a website lately and hated Wordpress. It didn't allow me the customization I wanted, and I didn't want to have to try a thousand different themes to find one that was set up correctly. I am however new to Wordpress, and so possibly misunderstood how to use it.

Regardless, I recommend this: http://www.wysiwygwebbuilder.com I just tried it and it's similar in feel to C2, has lots of great features, drag and drop placement, isn't too expensive, has a free demo and you can even incorporate a C2 game as an element of a page rather than using C2 for the entire page itself without too much difficulty. Here's a peek at what I've been doing with it - I didn't mean to show this to anyone yet so please excuse how stuff is strewn about and misaligned as it's only for testing purposes: http://www.amirai.net/shards/

It has a couple of images rotating at faint opacity using CSS animation and a C2 game overlaid across most of the entire page for the trailing particles following the mouse. That required a little tweak to the index.html C2 generates to get the game to have a transparent background, but aside from that, no code editing was needed. The page itself is at a lower opacity, it's not normally supposed to be that dark, but you get the idea of some of what can be done.

What do you need in WP? I probably will be able to help you. Used to do it professionally.

Maybe the concerns if we want to use Construct 2 for web design is:

• In many browser Canvas elements is NOT hardware accelerated (specially mobile browser)

This is weird but this is fact and the contrary many CSS specially CSS3 tags is hardware accelerated (also true for mobile browser) so big chance is website using CSS design layout is lighter on resource and faster to render than Canvas based design.

• Rendering Website is very different than Rendering Games.

Rendering website NOT require real-time update but Rendering Games require 60 update per second (60 fps is Construct 2 standard)

Even if our website only have static contents but if they rendered using Canvas at 60 fps then activity like visiting and browsing our website will drain our phone battery faster like when we are playing games.

So just like why we prefer full HTML website than full Flash website.

• Maybe we can use WebGL to replace the Canvas but rendering DOM is very different than rendering Sprites.

such as rendering C2 Text Object will drop WebGL performance that why we use Sprite Font for better performance under WebGL because every changes on Text Object, WebGL need to generate new texture.

• SEO (search engine crawler/bot can't browse our Canvas or WebGL sprites/elements)

This will make our website visibility on search engine is harder to get better top page ranking position on search engine results page.

• Content Management System using Construct 2 will be much more difficult.

because we manage 1 page = 1 layout, how if we have more than 100 pages? like how if we want to change our web look and feel - modify all 100 more pages one by one? also for only small changes, we must render whole site design and re-upload whole site, so maybe this only suitable for static small website but not for dynamic big website.

So imo if we want our site to reach much more wider audiences including those that using low-end phones then its better to use CSS and HTML but if we only target users with high-end phones then maybe we can use Canvas/WebGL for our websites

gamesura

Everywhere I tested it, apart from one single laptop, the canvas was hardware accelerated, not necessarily WebGL compatible, but still hardware accelerated.

C2 will not update the display if nothing changes (so indeed, your static objects would work fine), also, 60 fps is not C2 standard, the number of fps depends on the refresh rate of the device reported by the browser.

For dynamic, you could do just fine with reauesting external files technically, but this is another matter.

The real issue is simply to keep it light and easy for the user, and doing this with html+CSS is far easier and is designed for it.