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Create attractive websites without knowing HTML
Creating a visual style for a website often begins with a graphic artist creating a look in Photoshop, which then needs to be recreated in HTML by a web designer. Xara Web Designer is an editor that allows artists to directly output HTML from their work, saving lots of time.
Xara products usually offer output of HTML templates, but Web Designer is capable of producing entire sites.
The interface will be familiar if you’ve used previous Xara products, but if you haven’t then you will notice the lack of tools and buttons found in other web editors.
For example, there’s no option to directly insert HTML. The program is therefore better suited for static pages, rather than dynamic sites with lots of code.
However, not every site needs dynamic content and the options to create sophisticated layouts make up for this loss. It’s possible to wrap text around images without resorting to Flash and you can create dropdown menus that work in web browsers with images turned off.
Unfortunately this doesn’t extend to browsers with Javascript disabled, as the menus become invisible.
Xara bundles 17 templates with Web Designer, although these weren’t included on the disc we had. Novices can use these as a basis for their site, while more advanced users can create designs from scratch.
The biggest disappointment is the lack of a good site manager such as the one that comes with Dreamweaver. Pages are arranged one after another, which makes managing larger sites more difficult.
A tool allows linking to internal pages without remembering the address. The preview options are limited to a built-in preview window rather than direct export to your browser.
Xara Web Designer is ideal if you want to create a small and simple webpage with a particular look but don’t have the necessary coding skills.
Pros Great design tool; no HTML knowledge needed; produces
reasonably clean and efficient HTML
Cons Not useful for dynamic web sites; lacks a useful site
manager
Overall Xara Web Designer is great for creating design-led web
pages, but needs better site management tools. Useful for designing templates
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I Love Xara Web Designer..
You Stated " For example, there?s no option to directly insert HTML. " That is not correct - Xara Web Designer uses a PlaceHolder found in the Website Properties ( right-click on any object), which replaces that object with what ever html code you enter - typically iframes which are not bound by the dimensions of the host object, but it can be anything including code. 2) "Pages are arranged one after another, which makes managing larger sites more difficult." - That is true but you can give each page a unique "(name).html" and it exports under that name instead. I find the fact that you can see an edit all of the pages at once fantastic. I can cut/copy-n-paste objects from one page to another with ease 3) The preview options are limited to a built-in preview window rather than direct export to your browser. That is true, it's actually and export and preview option. 4) Xara Web Designer is ideal if you want to create a small and simple webpage with a particular look but don?t have the necessary coding skills. I wholeheartedly disagree. I purchased it 2 weeks ago, learned how to use it and created three full websites already. I'm working on an e-commerce site now and I don't see any limits to what I can do. two of the completed sites are listed below: http://www.AskRomeo.com done entirely in XWD with embedded html and javascript and http://www.maghousehampton.com/index2.html which uses shell created in Dreamweaver utilizing XWD pages in iframes. --- I agree that the site management sucks but since I export the XWD page into DreamWeaver and use their features. it works for me great. Right now I'm learning Xara Xtreme Pro which is like Web Designer on steroids where you can create flash animations and 3D models... With these products I feel as though I wasted money on buying Adobe Web Design CS4 which has so many hard to get to features. And I'm thrilled to have to worry less about using CSS and worrying about hex color codes. ( sorry I wrote a lot but this product actually has me excited about doing web design/development again )
Posted by Skip, 29 May 2009