Downloading and unzipping content

This page documents the process of downloading and unzipping content that is available for download either for free or as purchased content.

All content that is downloaded from this site is packaged into a zip file that will need to be unzipped on your computer.

Downloading content

Downloading content is pretty straight forward and the user experience is similar across the internet, just click on the download button or link to commence the download.

A download button is used where the zip file that will be downloaded contains multiple files, download buttons are used for web site templates that contain multiple files such as html pages, cascading style sheets, JavaScript etc.

Downloading via the download buttons can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute depending on the content that is being downloaded. A Download button's label will change from "Download" to "Downloading..." and become un-clickable to prevent multiple downloads from being triggered. Once the download is complete the download buttons label will change back to "Download" and the button will become clickable again.

Download links are used where the zip file being downloaded contains a single file and the downloads are completed normally within 5 seconds.

Once the download is complete your browser or computers operating system will notify you, this notification varies depending on what browser and operating system you are using. Most operating systems place a downloaded file into the "Downloads" folder. This is the case for Windows and Mac OS X.

Unzipping content

Below are the steps for unzipping a zip file downloaded from this site. The screen shots in this example are from Windows 10 that unfortunately has a slight complication when it comes to unzipping the files. The complication will be covered below.

On a side note Mac OS X automatically unzips the file and opens Finder at the location of the downloaded and unzipped file.

  1. Click on the download link or button

    2. It can take anywhere from 5 seconds to a minute for a download to complete depending on the content that was selected for download

  2. Once the download is completed navigate to the "Downloads" folder where the browser placed the zip file. In general, the downloaded file is called "web-template.zip".
  3. Unzip the file

    4. This is where we address the Windows 10 complication with unzipping files, if you find that the unzipped file contains no files it means Windows used its native default decompression utility that produces this result. This issue is well documented on the internet with many users experiencing the issue.

    To extract the files from the "web-template.zip" file you need to use the "7-zip" utility in Windows. See the screen shot below for reference.

    Right click the "web-template.zip" and from the pop-up menu select 7-zip and one of the extract options (Extract files, Extract Here or Extract to "web-template\").

    Screen shot of Windows 7-zip extract

  4. After step three has been performed with the "Extract to web-template\" option a folder named "web-template" will be created in your "Downloads" directory. All the files of the content you downloaded reside within this folder.

    5. Screen shot of unzipped files
  5. Drill down into the unzipped folder until you reach the content files. Normally the content files appear under the folder that has a name that appear like this "b8e5940e-ba05-48b4-b92c-30946115ec69". This alpha-numeric folder name is the content identifier.

    6. Screen shot of unzipped file contents

    From here you can examine the content(s) of the zip file to determine how to use it within your web site. Double clicking on html files will open the file in your browser, all the content html pages need to render is included in the download meaning you can view pages offline and incorporate them into your project.