I nearly jumped ship today

[Cloud]

This morning I checked out serif webplus x4. This seemed to have it all, built in form creator, built in sitemap creator, built in robots.txt, built in flash and javascript gallery, built in flash navigation bar, built in favicon insertion, the list is endless. So i checked out a friends copy of it and to be honest there were some features on there which are really needed on webdesigner, but then I started to play around with it and actually it is not bad but, and this like jLO is a BIG BUT, it is not a designers tool, with webdesigner I can be as creative as I like and come up with some great (even though I say so myself) looking sites. I know that a few hours of using a new software does not give a good idea of it's capabilities, but after a few hours with webdesigner I had done my first site.

To cut a long story short(er) xara should take some ideas from serif and make a 'premium' version of webdesigner (not designer pro) for web designers who want to make a business of web design, and include built in galleries, forms etc. I personally would pay more for it (serif's offering costs £80, which i think is still good value for money) as long as it was still a designers tool and not a web programmers tool.

I wonder what you guys think and whether anyone has had any experience with serif's web software, in particular the new webplus x4.

In summary; I will be sticking with xara and webdesigner.



Kash

[gwpriester]

Yeah, we hear you. The grass is always greener and all that.

And, yeah, let's hope the Xara team are reading this and getting some ideas.

Glad you're still on board.

[Cloud]

Thanks!

By the way while I was researching serif webplus I came across this website http://serifaddons.com/page-peel.html and decided to try out the page peel thing on serif webplus, and it was quite cool, and it occurred to me that this should be easy with webdesigner and so I tried it and the result is

http://baildoncarpets.com/

I thinks it's bloody cool. I think now I'll take some of the other javascript stuff from the serif site.

kash

[Pixelpusher]

I own Serif X4 and Web Builder 7 (aside from the Xara products,) and if you were to take all of the cool features of both of these competing products and implement them into Xara no one could beat it. I prefer Xara over Serif but the WB 7's coolest feature are the extensions and add-ons that the developer and users have created to bring drag and drop functionality to many tedious enhancements. They also just released the new extension builder that will allow anyone to create their own plugins and share them with the WB7 community. The guy who developed WB7 also updates his program extremely often bringing more features and enhancements and they are always free to registered users.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advertising or endorsing any other software. I'm just stating that there are many things that Xara could bring to the table if they were to research what these people are doing and then implement some of those technologies into Xara for those of us who use it every day to create. No one can replicate Xara's ability to repel text and create great graphics, but it lacks in the other web design categories of built in form creation and javascript enhancement additions (to name a short few.)

There should also be ways to do basic things without the addition of tweaks. Hacking is not professional when these things could be built in to an already amazing program.

You have to step it up Xara... your competitors are way ahead of you in the web design department.

[Cloud]

A friend has started using serif's offering and he says I must be mad using xara web designer as it is so far behind webplus x4 in almost every way, he however is not a designer so it appeals to him more and he has used dreamweaver for a couple of years

The Mad Hatter

[xufa]

Not sure how one considers one is behind/in-front of the other when there is no race.
One is different from the other sure - but that's it.
You, the customer makes a choice. It's that simple.

[Cloud]

Actually this should be considered as a race as untimatly xara are a software company who sell their product as being the best out there at what it does and as customers; who with our hard earned cash make the purchase, we do have the right to make the choice and to ask for the software to be better and better. As a business I make sure that what I offer my customers is at least as good as what the competition offers, and as someone who has made the purchase and has made other purchases from the same company over the years I would think that what I pay to upgrade at least once a year is as good as what others are offering.

We all want xara to improve their products because the majority of us on this forum are very loyal to xara products (you only have to check out other forums where we stick up for xara to see how loyal we are to it) and if xara listened to some of the amazing people on here and other xara forums then they would be in a position at the head of the pack, which they deserve to be. I have lost count of the amount of times I have recommended xara products to other designers and the amount of times designers have turned around and pointed out that they either have not heard of xara or they do not see them as contenders even in the amatuer to semi-pro arenas.

This needs to change because xara is not exactly a new company, it has been around for some time and newer companies with inferior products and followings are overtaking them, what you seem to have not noticed in my post is that it was the other person who said that xara is behind the others.

[Quack19]

I also own both Webdesigner and Serif WebplusX4. I must admit that, whilst using both programmes fairly regularly, my preferences are beginning to favour Webplus for the features it has built in. Shame really as I do like Xara products but they do need to update.

[w00dy]

Snap... I've got Web Builder and Serif as well as DP6 and WD6 and I almost exclusively use Xara because it's is quick and you can make it do almost anything using placeholders. Along the way I've spent a small fortune on scripts (mainly from Coffeecup and phpJabbers... their Simple CMS rocks) but I can use those in any of the programs mentioned here. I would be nice if Xara brought out a range of their own add-ons that integrated smoothly. That said, I always try to remain "independent".... I really don't like add-ons that carry any form of branding and which I don't have full control of. Serif tie you down to doing their way far too much for my liking.

[behzad]

Just downloaded serif demo, not really into it, xara makes it so user friendly and easy to make a website. I am sure in the later versions they will keep amazing us with added features. I will never jump ship Actually I always invite others to come on board