Should I move to Web Designer 6?

[jimgardner]

Hi - I'm new to this forum and to Web Designer software. I have just downloaded the trial version of WD 6 after receiving an Email asking if I want to upgrade from Webstyle 4. To date I've used Net Objects Fusion (NOF) for web design and Xara Webstyle to create great looking graphics, however having used NOF for many years I'm now looking at what alternatives are out there. So far the product looks great and although I've only just started looking at it today (and it's difficult when you haven't seen the software before) I have a couple of questions from what I've seen so far (a) I may be mistaken but is WD just for 'reasonably small' websites? I currently maintain a village website which was designed with NOF(http://www.egginton.org.uk) but would want to ensure that the product can easily cope with sites that are say 30 - 50 pages in size (b) I couldn't see any 'site view' capability. One of the things I really like about NOF (although it has it's many detractors) is the 'site view' where you are presented with a top down map of the site where you can easily click on any page icon and add, delete or move pages around. In WD it seems that you have a linear sequence of web pages that you have to scroll up and down to select and the site structure is not evident. (c) From the design template I downloaded (the beta_website template) it seemed a little laborious (unless I've not quite understood the software) to amend the design. For example, it looked like I had to edit every page to remove the 'Logotype' object in order to replace it with something else. Is there not a way of amending a 'Master' layout that affects all pages (similar to having a Master slide in Powerpoint)? Apart from these questions, the software looks really good and fun to use. Just not sure yet whether it's worth making the investment in time to 'jump ship' from NOF and learn something new!

Sorry about the long post - would be interested in anyone's views/comments.

[w00dy]

Hi Jim... Over the years, I've used Webstyle, Frontpage, various WYSIWYG editors, HTML Editors, CMS's and briefly Netobjects Fusion, which I never really got to grips with and in the end just put it down as a bad investment but Web Designer is a breath of fresh air. If you want a graphically pleasing, smallish site (50 pages), it brilliant and you get great results really quickly. Having used Xtreme for several years, the learning curve was minimal and it shouldn't take you long to adapt.

Objects can be repeated (and updated) on all pages, see "Arrange" menu. Click the "Page & Layer " gallery on (top right in Main Menu bar) and then you can move between pages without all the scrolling.

The actual menu system in WD6 is a dream, create your menu and then repeat it on all pages.

[jimgardner]

Hi Many thanks for taking the time to reply. Do you know if there is any guidance anywhere on website size (either in terms of no. of pages or file sizes)? I know it's a bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' question but scalability is important as I wouldn't want to have to spend a lot of time learning WD6 only to find I have to revert back to other software because it wont cope , for example, with a large site with over 50 pages.

[w00dy]

There's quite a bit of debate on here about page limits. I don't know if anyone was hit a limit.. someone had an 80 page site I think without problems... but to make my life easy, I tend to split bigger sites up into different sections and link them through the main menu on the home page. For example, our main college site is contained in one .web file and different areas such as students, staff and extended school are separate .web files. If you're going to build really big sites with multi-user access, then a CMS is perhaps a better option. For the price, WD6 has to the best buy out there.

[pauland]

It's always worth trying out new things - it expands our minds and even if it doesn't work out, there may well be something that you'll learn that will be useful with using NOF.

Site organisation is the weak side of XWD and is the really strong part of NOF. Bit of a ying and yang situation. XWD is really page collections made with a design program.

Gary Priestler uses both.

[Soquili]

Gary Priestler uses both.

What a coincidence, so does Gary W. Priester.

Sorry Paul I could not resist.

[pauland]

Gary Priestler's alter-ego..

Sorry Gary.

[jimgardner]

Thanks for all your help guys. Given the price I'll probably take the plunge and purchase as I'll be taking the upgrade option and upgrading from Webstyle 4 (a bargain). Might be useful to have an alternative to NOF. Sure do wish WD had NOF's site management option though (once you've used it, it's so much easier to manage your site) - perhaps something for a future release?

[pauland]

Try the trial first.

[jonazen]

I've been in IT (running the gamut from code-monkey to CIO), management consulting and the like for decades, and despite not being a "pro" at graphics or web design, I've used numerous packages, including all the Xara products, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, the Corel products (since v1 of draw!), DrawPlus, NOF, a few generations of MS tools for corporate websites, and a variety of inexpensive web design tools.

Until I started using Xara Xtreme 5 as a web tool, I always found the web design process to be more "work" than fun. Dreamweaver is great when you want explicit control over layers, pixel-level alignment and CSS, and I understand the latest version works well with various CMS templates (e.g., Joomla, Wordpress, etc). I can totally relate to the observation that NOF is great at presenting and letting you manage web navigation and organization, master elements, etc. Xara (xtreme and XWD) is clearly less than intuitive when your site is more realistically diagrammed as a tree structure than a linear collection of pages. I would hope Magix / Xara considers enhancing these areas in the future (features like tree nav and master/template items similar to PowerPoint) -- it would add to an already excellent product.

In the end, I still have tools like Dreamweaver -- but haven't found a good reason to first them up recently except for annual updates to existing sites that I built 3 or 4 years ago in Dreamweaver. All new projects I've done over the last year have been using Xara. I love the 100% wysiwyg approach and the great results for relatively little effort.

One thing I HAVE noticed that might related to your question about building large sites: I *do* wish site uploads could be "smart", the way Dreamweaver (for example) can differentiate and only upload files that differ from those on the target server. Lacking this, I occasionally find it a bit annoying that I wind up uploading the entire site for a small set of changes.

I've been debating buying XWD6, and have been hoping that Xtreme Pro 6 would come out soon so I could simply upgrade to that from Xtreme 5. But with the upgrade from Xtreme 5 to XWD being something like $29, I'm on the verge of caving in today to get XWD6 now and giving it a spin. I think the new features and UI improvements will be worth it while I'm waiting for Xtreme Pro 6 to come out.

In general - I'm finding myself looking at other tools, but always coming back to Xara as the most "comfortable" environment to work in. Very productive, fun, great results.

- Jon