Converting WD9 sites to WD10 - What I gave found so far...

Hi All,

I am currently in the process of converting an existing WD9 site into WD10 RWD so it works properly on mobile devices.

I have to say, the first thing I noticed was that just by publishing a WD9 site in WD10 makes a massive improvement in how the page is displayed on a mobile device, whether it is a tablet or phone! The page fits the screen and scaling is all very we behaved, as is rotating the screen. Full marks to Xara on that, and worth the price of the upgrade alone.

However, for smaller devices, RWD becomes more important, and this is where I have noticed a few things that Xara should look into.

By going into Utilities->Website Variants->Website Variants... you can create a mobile variant for your existing project. This creates a secondary project with a page width of 480px, but it is joined to the original (I suggest making a backup copy of your project first!). This new variant is essentially a copy of the original with a different page width.

So far so good.

According to the Online Help, you can now rearrange your page elements (text boxes, images etc) to suit your new page width. The manual says you can resize them and move them around.

True! But I have found some annoying foibles....

Text

I have found that resizing a text box (and scaling up or down the text size) causes the change to happen on the original site too, knocking the design of that one out of whack.

Images work fine - you can scale and move those no problem.

All the elements have two diagonal lines in the top right of their bounding box that tells you that the element is being shared across all variants. You need to turn that off for your text boxes!

To do that, right click on the text box, select Website Variants->Stop Sharing with Variants. Do this BEFORE you make any changes to it!

Repeating objects.

Repeating objects cannot be shared and you must stop sharing as described above if you want to make changes. For example, I have a coloured rectangle as a background to my title banner on all pages. The first bug I noticed was that the bounding box had no resizing handles on the top, bottom or sides! This means I can only resize a rectangle by the corners! Deleting the rectangle and drawing a new one fixed this. However, when I made it a Repeating Object again, none of the attributes get copied, so using Arrange->Put to Back does not automatically copy that attribute across all the pages! A BIG ANNOYANCE! XARA, PLEASE FIX!! I had to go to all 30+ pages and move each object back manually.

Supersites

As sexy as Supersites are, I'm not sure that I like how they work. Basically, it seems it puts all your pages into one big page. I think this might be ok for a new site with a few pages, but for a large, existing site, it takes ages to load AND you no longer have your original pages, so if you have links to say, www.mysite.com/mypage.htm, then mypage.htm won't exist anymore and will probably screw up all your SEO efforts to date! Plus, if you have lots of pages, the new site is slow to load.

I am having the occasional crash, but the program seems more resilient and usually continues without losing anything. I am very much looking forward to the next software update - hopefully, some things will be fixed. A few suggestions:-

1) Fix the Repeating Objects attributes not copying issue.
2) Fix the Text resizing issue when shared across variants
3) Perhaps make the two diagonal lines a toggle switch? Double-click on them to stop sharing? (Quicker than right-clicking, etc..)

That's all I have for now. I'll add to this thread as I discover more(!).

Please share anything you may have found?

Best regards,


Ian

I also had some things change on the main site while working on the mobile one.
I changed the text boxes so they wouldn't be shared.
I don't know if that is a "feature" between the variants.
I realize the intent was for changes in the text to carry over, but the positions shouldn't.

Hi Merlin_AZ,
I agree. I think the way it should work is that the text only is shared, but in each variant the size and position may be different (not shared).

Or perhaps it needs a set of checkboxes where you can choose what is to be shared:-

Text
Font
Font Size
Position

It would make sense, but then could make the product more complicated to use.

I agree, had all of the above. Actually some text boxes needed to be edited so that looked better on the mobile variant so stopping sharing did fix a lot of my problems. 18 pages takes an eternity to load on a smartphone on LTE. Yes, my artwork is mostly resized but perhaps needs to smaller?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iannicholson

Hi Merlin_AZ,
I agree. I think the way it should work is that the text only is shared, but in each variant the size and position may be different (not shared).

Or perhaps it needs a set of checkboxes where you can choose what is to be shared:-

Text
Font
Font Size
Position

It would make sense, but then could make the product more complicated to use.

---

What ppi is the artwork on your pages?
They shouldn't be larger than 72 in general.
Also, Xara usually "optimizes" photos when they are copied over, so that might be unrelated.
Just throwing it out there.

HI every one , I just exported my website using V10 and I noticed the tweeter widgets disappear it just show tweets by @myuser

HI Ian

Text

There are several things in place to combat this.

a) Resizing text areas and columns using the middle control handles will cause the text to flow and not scale. This will allow you to resize your text column / area within the mobile variant without affecting the other variants.
b) Text styles can be used to apply different font properties per variant. With the text tool enabled, select or click within the text column. Change the font properties via the text tool infobar and then select Update style in this variant from the styles drop list.

Repeating Objects

- All groups in Web Designer 10 ( repeating objects are groups ) have their middle handles removed. You can ctrl + click on a repeating group to select inside should you need to resize an object or disable the lock aspect ratio should you wish need squash or stretch objects.

-Regarding the stacking order of repeating objects, this is not new to version 10. It’s a known issue / current limitation with repeating objects/

Hi Jhorta, the Twitter widget is a known issue and is being looked into.

Id recommend trying the Twitter website widget as a temporary workaround.

Hi bb2,

Thanks for your reply - very helpful!

I have more sites to convert and so will your your advice with those.

Many thanks and regards,



Ian

Hi bb2,

I am still having problems with menus! Please check out my site at http://www.biready.com.au

The menu on the index page works fine, but when you select another page (Try 'News', 'Contact' etc) the ONLY menu items to work are the first and second (Home and Products).

This menu worked fine before I tried making the site a Supersite (which I reverted back to Conventional) or added a variant.

I deleted all the files of my hosted server and republished - to no avail.

Any ideas?

Best regards,


Ian