Xara Web Designer 6

Even if you’ve got to grips with the art of creating attractive designs for paper projects, trying to recreate them for a website can be a frustrating experience.

Xara Web Designer is a web design program that manages to give users the freedom to create the designs they want without ending up with websites that nobody can view.

This latest version has a new, rather black, look that stands out against the grey tones of most Windows software. The interface is uncluttered but it hides some powerful editing tools. Rather than having lots of icons that are always on view, some icons open sub-menus when clicked. It took us no longer to get used to than other software and helped us concentrate on the design rather than the software.

We liked the automatic backup tool that keeps up to ten previous versions of the website you’re designing. The Page and Layer Gallery helps keep the pages of the website organised, though it’s a shame you can’t create pages within sections as this would help when managing larger websites.

This omission is partly balanced by the excellent navigation bar designer. Both vertical and horizontal menus can be created with sub-menus to keep things simple for your visitors. They can be generated automatically from the pages on the site or set up by hand.

It is also possible to include raw HTML code in pages. This is useful if you want to include small sections of information from other online accounts such as photos stored with Flickr.

The website preview doesn’t let you choose the browser to use and instead opens in Xara’s own window. Our best guess is that it’s Internet Explorer but it would be best to manually check your site in as many browsers as possible.

One excellent reason to buy Web Designer is that it can be used to create Flash animations including animated banners without having to buy the full Flash program. It has a limited set of effects but they are still more than enough for some impressive effects.

If you want to focus on the design of your website and not the technology behind it, Xara Web Designer 6 is an excellent program.