The Input Folder
The example project, just like any Winged Spider project is structured as a series of standard subdirectories (also known as folders). The 'input' folder contains all of the content to be rendered into a website. The defining idea of Winged Spider is that the user will get to navigate around in the ultimate rendered website using menus defined by the names given to the content files and folders.
The Output Folder
Alongside the 'input' folder are two other folders required for every Winged Spider project. Perhaps you've already guessed that one of them is 'output', which is where Winged Spider puts the completed html (and css, and javascript) of the completed project. Winged Spider is a static website generator, its responsibilities end with the generation of the completed 'output'. To actually deploy the output onto a live website is a separate topic beyond the scope of Winged Spider itself. For my own projects I tend to use a program called Filezilla (available for Windows for example on ninite.com) to simply copy the contents of the output folder to the html directory of an Apache web server. You may have other arrangements.
The Template Folder
The other fundamental folder is 'template'. Unsurprisingly I suppose this is where Winged Spider looks for the template that tells it how to render markdown into the final website. It would be terribly inflexible to have this information baked permanently into the Winged Spider executable, some kind of template feature is essential. The Winged Spider templating system is very simple. Initially there is just one template, using a simple CSS framework from Yahoo called Pure (you can Google it). It would be nice if someday there are other Winged Spider templates, you can never tell how these things are going to go. For the moment Winged Spider and its single template is sufficient for live operation of the significant medium sized production website it was created for, so I am confident it is fit for purpose.
It's a Command Line Tool
Winged Spider is a command line tool, a single executable program that runs with minimal command line arguments. Winged Spider has been tested on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. If you need to compile it from source - the key thing to know is that it's just a matter of compiling and linking the C++ files (as found in the Github repository), in the simplest possible way, there's no need for external dependencies or special options (perhaps -std=c++17 if your compiler defaults to older versions of C++). Run the Winged Spider executable in your project directory, the directory with 'input', 'output' and 'template' directories. Run it with a '-?' argument to get a list of command line options.
Learn by doing
To get started with Winged Spider, the best idea is to make a copy of the Example project that comes with the Winged Spider distribution and start experimenting with it. Once you've got a feel for Winged Spider that way, you should be better able to judge whether it is suitable for whatever project you have in mind for it. If you judge that Winged Spider is suitable, you might decide to start that project by modifying a copy of the example project, or by starting afresh, it's a matter of personal taste.
For best results make sure you can quickly grab a fresh copy of the unaltered example project, that way you can restart the experimentation from a known starting point easily, at any stage.
Experiment 1) Rebuilding the Example Project
To start off, rebuild the example project. To do that run the winged spider executable in the project directory, with the -f flag. The -f flag indicates 'force a complete rebuild'. Winged Spider should provide an informative report on its operations that will help if for some reason you need to troubleshoot this basic operation. Assuming all goes well you should see newly rebuilt html files in the 'output' folder and you should be able to browse them with any browser.
The next section has a series of further experiments where we can continue to learn by doing.