Dear Mr. Internet: How do I copy my Web site into a PowerPoint presentation so I don't have to go online to show it during meetings with prospects and clients? Roger Lundy RE/MAX Real Estate Group I Indianapolis, IN

Dear Roger:

I have good news for you. You can easily turn your Web site, or any other for that matter, into a powerful and fast offline presentation. You don't need to "copy" your Web site, buy any software, or even use PowerPoint. There is a much easier and free way to demonstrate your site offline!

If you are using IE 5.0 (or greater) as your Web browser, you already have all the tools you need to capture and play back any Web site offline. It is not much more difficult than saving your site as a "favorite" or bookmark in your browser's Favorites menu. The great thing about this method is that it is built right into your browser and you can update your offline copy any time, even automatically!

5 Steps To An Automatic Presentation

The process of saving your site is very straightforward, here's how you do it:

a.Navigate to the site you want to view offline and save it as a "favorite" under your "Favorites" menu;
b.Check the "Make available offline" box and click the "Customize" settings button;
c.Click the "Yes" radio button (to store linked pages) and set the link depth to 2 pages (don't go much deeper than that or it could take up an enormous amount of disk space).
d.Click the "Next" button to set the synchronization schedule to manual;
e.Click "Okay" to complete the process and you are ready to go!

If you would prefer how to see how to do it, I've created a special "viewlet" that will give you a personal step-by-step demonstration on exactly how to save your entire site offline! With this animated and fully annotated slide show, you can play it over and over again until you really "get" how it's done —very cool. To get started, just CLICK HERE, sit back and enjoy!

Keep in mind that no matter how sophisticated or complex your site happens to be, this method will (almost always) be able to show everything including Flash animations, javascript, DHTML effects and the like —only much more quickly. The only time it becomes a little tricky is for database-driven template sites...

Temperamental Templates

If the site you want to demonstrate is a database-driven template, then you need to take one additional step. Before you save the site as a "favorite" be sure to click on all the links that you plan to access during your offline demonstration. This puts a temporary copy of those pages in your browser cache and allows the offline synchronization process to properly store these pages when saved as a favorite.

When you are ready to show your site during a presentation, just go to the "File" menu and select "Work Offline". Then go to the "Favorites" menu and select the site you saved for offline viewing. It will instantly appear and so will any of the links you click (up to the depth that you saved them).

You will find that this is a much more dynamic and powerful way to demonstrate the benefits of your site to a prospect than any series of slides you could ever hope to show. And the best part is that it didn't cost you a dime and it was already put together for you!