Xara Web Designer

Xara is a name from the graphics software business, so as you might expect, although it’s a web page editor, Web Designer’s strong suit is in graphics and page layout.

Web Designer works very much like a desktop publishing program or graphic editor – objects such as text boxes, panels, photos, shapes can be placed anywhere on the page.

Xara’s text-wrapping features were impressive and the program even automatically changed the formats and sizes of imported photos, so pages don’t take forever to download. It’s easy to create pop-ups, too.

There aren’t many page editors that make it so easy to fill objects with graduated colour, for example. Drag across with the fill tool and you can set the start and finish points and direction of fill in one stroke. Not just that, but it can do the same with the transparency tool, producing variable transparency of an object over its background.

The core of the program is an extensive set of design galleries in which the user can create everything from a complete site down to a single button by dragging and dropping items from a palette. If you’re happy to use or modify these designs, it works well. They are smart, modern designs, so pages have style before you even start making changes.

One of the main claims Xara makes is that Web Designer can design pages without users needing any knowledge of HTML, but page editors aimed at home customers have been highly usable for years and there’s no need to use HTML with any of them.

Serif’s Web Plus, for example, or Mr Site’s Takeaway Website, or online offerings such as Microsoft Office Live, show that it’s easy to create good-looking web pages without having to know anything about the code that makes them up.

More to the point, there are several things those other editors can do which are beyond the grasp of Web Designer. Simple things such as making a developer’s site map to show the hierarchy of pages and how they interlink, for example, are missing.

For uncomplicated personal websites this is a good tool, but if you want to run a small business site, say, it lacks features.