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
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Originally Posted by iannicholson
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