WinWSD WebSite Downloader for Windows is a freeware used to download and save a website to your local hard drive. It enables you to view all the links and contents of the saved website in offline mode. This is great for folks who want to “browse” their favorite web pages even when they are not online.
If you use Firefox a lot, make sure to read my previous post about ScrapBook, a cool add-on that lets you save web pages or entire websites easily.
To download a web site, click File and select New project. In the project directory window, select the directory where you want to save you new project and enter the project name.
After saving your new project, the project settings window will appear. Click the add button to enter the website address or URL of the site you want to download. Select Download whole site in the project type option. There are five available options to download the whole site, skip the multimedia files, grab only photos or only the multimedia files, or download only executables. This is a good tool for users who want to download only a specific type of content like MP3 or movie files.
After adding the URL or website address click ok to go back to the main page. Click the project on the menu and select Start/Restart. The downloading of the website will now start. Click the Start Page button to see the homepage of the website you are downloading.
After finishing the download navigate to the folder where you have saved your project. Locate the filename index and double click the file. This will display the homepage of the website you have downloaded.
Even if you are disconnected from the Internet, you will still be able to browse and navigate to the webpage. You can click on the links and you will be directed to the page of that link.
Notice the URL or web address in the address bar points to a location on the hard drive. This means that you are browsing the webpage locally and not from the Internet.
Click one of the links and you will be directed to the page where the link is pointing.
This tool is a great way for users who can’t get online all the time. You may download the installer from their homepage: http://winwsd.uw.hu/. My only gripe with this tool is that it doesn’t have an auto re-sync capability so when you get connected again you will need to download the whole page manually. It would have been great if it could sync itself on a preset time. Overall, this is a simple tool to pick up and downloads pages and contents quickly.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
There also an app called HTTrack for downloading websites. It has Windows and Linux versions:
http://www.httrack.com/