We test drives the latest update to Xara’s
Web Designer 9 Premium
The idea of setting up your own website can
be a daunting prospect, yet there are programs that can simplify the process.
Xara Web Designer is just such a product, adopting a different approach to the
problems that new designers face. It achieves this by moving away from the
conventional methods of web design, handling all the complexities of HTML,
JavaScript and image optimization internally. Leaving the designer to get on
with… designing.
Xara
Web Designer 9 Premium
Xara has just released version 9 of Web
Designer, a product that shares many of the common features found in Xara’s
excellent Designer Pro application. This review is based on the Web Designer 9
Premium product that comes with more content, free web hosting for 12 months
and over 30 other features that are missing from the standard version.
To get you started the program ships with
20 new professionally designed templates; these were originally sold for $18.12
each. That makes over 60 themed designs that are in fact complete website
structures, meaning that they come with multiple pages full of placeholder
text, graphics and animated slideshows, etc. All you have to do is exchange the
placeholders for your own content. To complement the templates there’s also a
large collection of clipart and web specific graphics. Everything from simple
buttons and social networking icons, to photo galleries and fully developed
Flash animations - so it's pretty straightforward to get your first website up
and running.
“The program ships with 20 new
professionally designed templates”
To
get you started the program ships with 20 new professionally designed
templates; these were originally sold for $18.12 each
Yet there’s so much more to the program
than that. If you want to start with a blank canvas, you can certainly do so,
picking objects from the different galleries, or designing from scratch using
the built-in toolsets. Because of its graphic nature and the background it
sprang from, Web Designer 9 has a range of rudimentary drawing and effects
tools, making it a more complete product than many of its competitors. For
example, if you want to enhance an image, you can fix red-eye problems, adjust
the color, brightness and contrast directly on the page. You can also add a
very nice bevel or drop shadow with a single click using the dedicated tools.
One of the major technical improvements to
this version is the move to 64-bit processing. If you’re already using the
64-bit version of Windows, you can address the full amount of RAM in your
machine. This improves the overall speed and fluidity of Web Designer 9,
consequently making the designing process more enjoyable. If you’ve upgraded to
Windows 8, this version is already optimized for touch-screen devices.
Because
of its graphic nature and the background it sprang from, Web Designer 9 has a
range of rudimentary drawing and effects tools, making it a more complete
product than many of its competitors
While using lots of different fonts can
make your website more interesting, it can be a problem if the visitors don’t
have those fonts installed. Most browsers will try to display a compatible
font, but sometimes it will mess up your whole design. Web Designer 9 now
includes two methods of dealing with this problem. Firstly you can embed the
font within the website itself (if your license permits), and secondly it
provides direct support for Google Fonts. These are a collection of over 600
open-source fonts, which you can use and embed within your website to overcome
the original problem.
Other notable features include
drag-and-drop navigation bar replacement, an easier method of recoloring
grouped objects and compatibility for devices that use the new high-resolution
'Retina' displays. What’s clever about this is that the web pages are smart and
will load the correct resolution graphics for the browser being used.
Other
notable features include drag-and-drop navigation bar replacement, an easier
method of recoloring grouped objects and compatibility for devices that use the
new high-resolution 'Retina' displays.
If you’re setting up a commerce website,
then the method used here for adding things like PayPal etc., were a bit long
winded, compared to the method employed by Serif’s WebPlus X6 that I reviewed
recently.
Finally, the Xara website has some tutorial
videos you can watch, you can also download a trial version to try before you
buy.
A simple to use website design suite, which
offers professional flair at a realistic price
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Details:
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Price: $135.88
·
Manufacturer: Xara
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Website: www.xara.com
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Required spec: Intel Celeron or newer, or AMD
Sempron or newer, 300MB HDD space, 500MB RAM, Windows XP or later
Scores:
·
Quality: 9/10
·
Value: 8/10
·
Overall: 8/10
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