Web Designer 10 Released

[mwenz]

Kate, just had a look at the samples on my Android phone. Way cool on the responsive part and on the transitions.

Well done. Mike

[Merlin_AZ]

Quick question.
If you import a WD9 website into V. 10, can you create different sized variants without having to rebuild it from scratch in V. 10?

[zaphodeist]

Yes, I did a quick & dirty test. There is obviously a bit of shifting about of objects to do but it's so much easier and quicker than doing a redirect and creating the variants from scratch on different urls

[TXAlba]

first thought......... not quite good enough, almost but not.
Does not rival Adobe Muse or WordPress, not even close, but for the upgrade price who can afford not to.

And so I will upgrade and in doing so continue to be a Xara product user, simply because.... i have a few designs now, working on two more at the moment and find XWD9P very good at what it does, particlularly as i come from a CorelDraw background and am not a code geek (yet). X for me does not have the WOW factor that makes me jump up and down going, yeah Yeah YEAH, gimme, Gimme, GIMME..... unfortunatley. Its more a - may as well upgrade type of Microsoft Office type of thing, feeling more like a chore than something to look forward to. Already, even before upgrading I am hoping that in the Next upgrade Xara brings us includes an integrated CMS option.

I would have also hoped for a lot more (R) templates included, a Lot LOT MORE, im sure there will be an add on option later. Responsive Design - should it be that hard, take that much more time to create sites? I'm not so sure the client wants it that much that it will cost them 2 or 3 times more! They do though want to update their own sites, theres that CMS sad face again.

Already worried about the resource of memory and site uploading errors......... so i do hope this has been thoroughly tested to prevent recent issues experienced by many in XWD9P

Supersites are interesting, a nice new feature.

Get the feeling this upgrade is more to meet upgrade deadline dates than to meet the demands of the website designer.

Let's Sum Up! There is a lot to like in Web Designer 10.............. Part 2 will be even better.

I hope it grows on me as well as with me.

[gwpriester]

Since it was listed last in Kate post, I'll post a link to my First Look here http://xaraxone.magix.net/xwd10/

Basically it boils down to this. As nice as it might be to to have one site work in all sizes, they don't. And then there's the question of bandwidth. All of those photos and slide shows and YouTube videos and other stuff can be really slow to load, even on a fast mobile network. Buttons that look great on a full size browser are impossible to see on a smart phone.

So the approach Xara has taken makes a lot of sense!

Xara does not build the variant site for you. It resizes the page to a good mobile site size, or you can create your own, it puts all the content from your full size site onto the page and then you resize and edit the material to make it work best on a small screen.

Does this take a lot of extra work? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely, if you are really serious about creating the best site for each device.

If you look at my review on a tablet, you get the best of both. In portrait, you see the mobile variant, if you rotate the site to landscape, you get the full size browser version.

I'm really excited about WD10 Premium.

[restless]

This all sounds great... but... the page is way too big for my desktop monitor. The screen resolution is set for 1024 x 768, on a 21 inch monitor. After 2 clicks of the - button on my Firefox browser it reduces enough to fit. That worries me - if the page won't even fit on a screen that measures almost 17 inches wide... Am I missing something? And please don't tell me to use higher resolution... my 73 year old eyes are straining as it is. Thanks. Ed

[csehz]

Gary thanks for the first look review, it is great as always

[Boy]

Does not rival Adobe Muse

To me the upgrade seems quite impressive and makes Web Designer an even more powerful program. I don't really know Muse and I would like to know in what areas Web Designer does not rival it, so could you expand on that?

[Cloud]

As someone who has used muse a bit I can say that the differences are:

RWD - muse also has this but not as good; it creates seperate html files for each variant and is limited to two variants.

Dynamic - Muse is completely dynamic; it has designated header and footer areas and the page expands according to demands of any dynamic code, so for instance ecwid pages will shorten and lenghten accordingly.

Parallax - Think of any parralax effects and muse can do them, fading parralax effects, animated parralax effects etc etc.

Widgets - the community can create widgets such as slideshows or button effects (such as fading rollovers) and you can install them into you library, and there are already hundreds created since the launch of this feature in November 2013. All widgets such as slideshows or tabs or accordians are fully customisable (size, colours etc etc. Widgets include full screen slideshows.

Rollover effects - there is a dedicated States option which means you can create inactive state, hover state, active state, visited state for anything without resorting to layers.

Forms - built-in form creator with the form backend hosted on your own servers (must have latest php) Every aspect of the form is customisable.

CMS - there is a full cms built in which allows a client to update anything you let them and all styles (fonts for headings etc) are kept, the interface for the control panel is similar to wordpress but fully wysiwyg. At the moment this feature is only available if you take Adobe Business Catalyst hosting (you get this free with the subscription) but according to reports is coming soon no matter where the site is hosted.

If you are used to any adobe products then you'll be able to use it to create a site within hours, if not then it's a couple of days learning but remember that the adobe muse community is far larger than xaras.

I had got to 98% completion of my own site with xara when I decided to go with muse for it's potential to creat stunning creative sites but then xara made it difficult for me and went and released v10, and to be honest (baring some teething problems with the rwd) I will go with webdesigner simply because the route they have taken with achieving responsive web design is far better, google recommend that only one html file is created for each page and webdesigner does this, whereas muse creates three separate html files, so for seo purposes it is far far better. I will still be using muse for some dynamic sites which require ecommerce.

[Boy]

Thanks for that overview, skech, really good stuff. Nice to hear that Xara implemented a RWD solution that is even better than Muse's. Pretty amazing that small Xara can keep up with giant Adobe and be competitive. Congratulations team!

Of course we hope that dynamic pages will be implemented, as well as CMS.