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Show Us Your Xtreme 4 created Website!
I have to say that the new HTML export, multi-page website creation ability has draw more response than almost any other feature I have covered in the Workbooks. And many of you have sent me e-mails with links to site you have put together with this new feature.
So, now it's time to share. List your website here for all to admire.
I'll start off with the sample site I created for this month's HTML Workbook.
For those who do not not how to link text in these forums, use the URL and /URL tags enclosed in angle brackets (see attachment).
Gary
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Dead basic :-( and links to a Picasa Gallery
http://black2colour.com/tcr/
Main Site Not XTREME, but will be :-)
http://black2colour.com
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Welcome to the Xtreme Gallery Red Thunder. :)
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
A test re-make of an extant site I did for my cousin. Xara made the positioning so much easier - especially the booking form! Used links code [webstyle generated of course] from original site, but apart from that it's all XXPro4. Also, a new site for same cousin's new project, utilising your buttons - very simple again (it's only holding pages for now obviously) but getting the positioning would have been a nightmare for me :)
Planning to redo the mess I call my main site asap :D
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Great idea Gary!
I'd really like to see how others are using only Xara software to design & create their own or a clients website
So here's one I completed earlier this week entirely in Xtreme4*.
(*The Gallery pages only show images edited in Xtreme)
► DrillNorth
Took around 6½ hrs which included three email communications (more photos supplied etc) with client who was as happy as I was that it was done in one day.
Popups were optional of course, but I had to try them out ;)
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Sledger, the banner is 285K! It's pretty slow to load.
My only criticism is that the images are way, way too large in terms of file size.
Paul
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Yes you're right Paul - though they load pretty quickly here (on an empty cache), I admit slower connections would make them slower to load.
I just changed the banners to jpg (39.8KB now).
The popup photos with drop shadows have to be PNG I'm afraid.
At least popups are optional.
Thanks for looking :)
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Sledger,
Great job.
I can see X4 is going to make web page life a lot easier without much stress.
When I get time, I am looking forwarding to making a web page in X4.
Rupert
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Cheers Rupert..
I agree, I'm all for quickies so long as they look good - Xtreme4 will definately make that possible..
Good luck.
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Hi Steve,
Nice site! :cool:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sledger
The popup photos with drop shadows have to be PNG I'm afraid.
You could try to export pop-ups as JPEG too, even though they have a shadow. If it looks bad, than you can separate shadow from the image and export image as JPEG and shadow as PNG (default). I have illustrated this approach in the attached file.
As you may see, all files are small and pop-up looks good. :)
Hope this helps.
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sledger
Yes you're right Paul - though they load pretty quickly here (on an empty cache), I admit slower connections would make them slower to load.
I just changed the banners to jpg (39.8KB now).
The popup photos with drop shadows have to be PNG I'm afraid.
At least popups are optional.
Thanks for looking :)
Sledger, some of your small images are taking 250K in png format. If you switch them to jpg/gif you will take 200K off the download for the four small pictures.
I can see no/very little difference in quality. My connection is cable broadband 512K.
The attached images are from DrillNorth: http://drillnorth.com.au and are only intended to show the ability to optimise the images. Sledger, feel free to remove the attachments if you wish - all copyright remains with the original copyright owner.
Paul
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Paul,
Xara won't use GIF so all the time and effort that you save will be expended changing all the graphics round.
John, (Covoxer) said that the Xara PNG files are 32bpp and that we should request 8bpp but not GIF.
I personally don't understand why a website creation tool wouldn't use the smallest file size generator. I don't think we'll see any appreciable difference from 32bpp to 8bpp when we are only viewing at 96dpi, and the speed difference (and file sizes) will be noticable.
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
John has pointed out elsewhere that gradients can appear banded at 8bit and that the transparency is not plagued by jaggies at 32bit - its horses for courses.....
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
ss-kalm
Paul,
Xara won't use GIF so all the time and effort that you save will be expended changing all the graphics round.
John, (Covoxer) said that the Xara PNG files are 32bpp and that we should request 8bpp but not GIF.
I personally don't understand why a website creation tool wouldn't use the smallest file size generator. I don't think we'll see any appreciable difference from 32bpp to 8bpp when we are only viewing at 96dpi, and the speed difference (and file sizes) will be noticable.
Well, it doesn't take very long to optimise the file sizes - I think it's well worth the effort. It's a pity that Xtreme (HTML generation) doesn't allow the choice of file exports to include jpg, but then again what it does do is pretty good.
Paul
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Paul and others
This is the first time out of the box for HTML exports. I would expect to see a lot of improvements soon. We are the testers here and our feedback is important to help Xara refine and improve this capability.
I tried out the suggestion to select all objects you want to export as JPEG, including one with a soft shadow over a gray background, and then naming them all at once as JPEG with the Create New Names (the yellow tag icon), and it worked perfectly. Even though each image is named JPEG they each export separately and the file size is greatly reduced. The drop shadow over the gray page background was very sharp and clean.
Gary
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
With the exception of the photographs this site was made entirely in Xara.
guestwishes.com
Sorry for not hyperlinking but this is a new site and Google picks up on hyperlinks really quickly.
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snip - post is irrelevant
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Quote:
I don't think we'll see any appreciable difference from 32bpp to 8bpp when we are only viewing at 96dpi, and the speed difference (and file sizes) will be noticable.
The average difference in size of the 8bpp GIF and 32bpp PNG is about 2 times in case of lineart images. Assuming that there are also some other files in the page including photo images, switching from 32bpp PNG to 8 bpp GIF will usually reduce overall download size by 1.5-2 times. Such difference can be noticed only in direct comparison. You wouldn't recognize whether the site is exported with PNG or GIF simply by opening it once.
As I've said before, and as is demonstrated here, the really significant difference in size is achieved by using JPEG instead of PNG/GIF for the photorealistic images. This provide about a 10 times size decrease of the image with minor visible quality decrease. But it provides poor results (both size and quality) for lineart, and it has no transparency support. That's why it's best to select export format manually.
Currently you can select which of these two export formats to use for every exported image. This covers the most significant optimisations of the exported design. More subtle tuning, like JPEG compression level or PNG color mode is not possible in current version.
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Hi
without in any way being critical as an avid web site designer ( User of Dreamweaver CS3) can I suggest that having valid html code is important.
I quick purusal of some of the code in the web sites listed does show some errors which can stop search engine robots and some browsers from displaying pages correctly.
Take a look at
http://www.htmlvalidator.com/
there is a trial version which can be used to check code and provide solutions
HTH everyone
Ian
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
pauland
Sledger, some of your small images are taking 250K in png format.
Paul those small images you picked out, none of them are over 250K as PNG?
3.png = 52.4KB / 5.png = 52.7KB / 6.png = 48.6KB / 8.png = 89KB
There are 3 popup PNG's on other pages that do exceed 250KB, but as stated, due to the use of alpha-transparency only PNG can be used. Waiting for popups is however entirely optional (although I would prefer OnClick rather than MouseOver - John?).
512K connection isn't the fastest I agree, flash,youtube videos and other streaming media suffers a bit at connections lower than around 1.5mbit ADSL1
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Sledger, If you add up the image sizes of the images I attached, they total 250K on the website, 50K as attached by me.
I don't particularly regard my cable connection as slow, I would say it's fairly typical and a lot faster than many.
The website generated by Xara is huge in download terms because of the images.
Paul
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
OK Paul, I appreciate your points but I think the merits or otherwise of Xtreme4 HTML export and possible website bloat, is better discussed in a new thread.
This thread is about showing websites created with the Xtreme4 new HTML export functions.
I'd like to see more examples ?
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
OK, I was trying to help you out, not complain about Xtreme.
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sledger
...but as stated, due to the use of alpha-transparency only PNG can be used.
Have you read my proposition here: http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost...0&postcount=10
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sledger
(although I would prefer OnClick rather than MouseOver - John?).
Already on the whishlist. ;)
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
covoxer
Yes John I did, and downloaded your example. Thanks for the idea :)
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► DrillNorth
Paul the photo images are now all JPG.
John I used a slightly different idea but based on your suggestion.
I removed the drop shadow entirely and created a grey veil behind the *.jpg popup photos rather like you see with those Lightbox java scripts.
I removed the first page popups as I don't have any larger images to make having them really worthwhile.
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Nice one sledger.
But now the mouseovers don't work:eek:
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
aridzone
But now the mouseovers don't work:eek:
Yes I mentioned that I removed the first page popups as I don't have any larger images to make having them really worthwhile.
Though the Gallery image mouse over still functions.
There are mouse over (popups) still on the LoFlo pages (link bottom left of page 1 and pages 2)
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I like the layout of the LoFlow pump page, but I had trouble reading the "Check out these great features:" section in the center of the page. So, I increased the text size to better read it.
In Firefox 2.0.0.14, I got an interesting result: changing the text size changed the text size for some text, but not in a good way. In Windows IE 6, the text size did not change when I tried to adjust it.
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
PatentGuy
I had trouble reading the "Check out these great features:" section in the center of the page.
In Windows IE 6, the text size did not change when I tried to adjust it..
It's not text, it's an image. The poster & photos were supplied to me to place on the site. I suppose I could blank it out and overlay real text.
edit: Hmm - not really possible, there's not enough room for real text to retain the current wording and, given the varying browser text rendering issues, I'd be better off leaving this one as is - it's the clients poster and wording..
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Not a web site, just the first germs of an idea. It's so quick to sketch one up though, I think I might finally get around to building one for myself!
http://www.jwhitham.plus.com/hello_world.htm
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
In the process of re-doing my web-site. Not finished by a long way yet, but I've found that on the "other links" page the picture links open up in Firefox and Opera twice. Set them to open in new page, as I did with other external links which open OK.
Any ideas why? :)
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
neodeist
I've found that on the "other links" page the picture links open up in Firefox and Opera twice. Set them to open in new page, as I did with other external links which open OK. Any ideas why? :)
This was a bug. It is already fixed, but have not received the latest version of the HTML filter yet. Wait for the next update.
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
neodeist
I've found that on the "other links" page the picture links open up in Firefox and Opera twice. Set them to open in new page, as I did with other external links which open OK.
:confused:
Have you fixed this, as I don't see this in Opera 9.27 / Safari 3.1 or FF2/FF3
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Still doing it in FF2 and Opera 9.24. But as John says above, the fix will be in next update. Odd that you don't get the double opening though :confused:
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Just checked and my Opera and FF are set to open new windows in tabs. Just changed them both to open new window and the links don't double up then.
Must be the tabs then. Can't remember FF doing that before though so perhaps it's combination of bug with tabs. ;)
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Just did a test page. Two images, one over text, set to open in new window, and they both opened without duplication! Think I'll have to redo that page and see what happens, but it still doesn't explain why you don't get the duplication Steve, or why it doesn't happen locally.
Ah well, it's Monday ..... ;)
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Re: Show Us Your Website!
Quote:
Originally Posted by
sledger
John I used a slightly different idea but based on your suggestion. I removed the drop shadow entirely and
created a grey veil behind the *.jpg popup photos rather like you see with those Lightbox java scripts.
Looks great! :)