Need a little bit of guidance with the web designer software before buying

Hello,

I have seen a demo of the web designer software last night and was super impressed!

Before buying I would like to ask a few questions please.

1)When the web design is generated, is the Xara brand showing anywhere in the files? As I would like to resell my creations as a freelancer.


2)What is the best way to export the designs to an Android platform? I would like to make static websites with infromative content that is copied into an Android app.


3)Does this software has all it needs to become a good UI UX designer(tool wise) as I would like to start taking UI UX design courses.




Thank you all!

I can answer part of your questions.

The Xara branding does not show in the files unless you place it there. On the templates you will see the Xara link but that you can remove without any problem. If you where to look at the HTML source code you may find the word Xara referenced but is for widgets that you may have added to the web design.

I have no experience with Android development so unable to help there.

There was a member on here that did use Xara for UI. He also sold some Website designs that he made. However, he decided to go do something else and he quit selling his designs. I tried to find his web site information because he had left some of his designs up but I can not locate it.

Here is a different thread, that the person who started, the person who started the thread,luciandesign, may be able to offer you some ideas.
https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...Android-Device

Ray

Hi Ray thank you for the kind reply.

From what I understood based on the link you gave me is that Cara is not responsive but instead you have to design a new website for each screen size, is it right? If yes then it is a bit of a nightmare if you have to include your PHP on multiple websites..ouch!

I will try to contact lucian design

Thanks.

Hi benoit

You do create variants (Xara's word for it) for various screen size spectrums. You can share text, etc. with all variants so you do not have to update all variants individually (but you can if need be). Not sure how that would impact .php files you create. It isn't as easy as a true responsive program but much better than having to create all screen sizes from scratch and updating them all. I have found that 2 sizes generally fits what I need, 3 is the most I've used. Once you get the hang of it work flow goes well enough. If you don't use Xara now, you might try a fully responsive designer (such as Coffeecups responsive designer) that will do what you want - the same learning curve but once you figure it out it all makes sense. So far, I'm good with Xara WD. Hope that helps.

Hi bkJohns,

Thanks for the reply.
Tonight i have exported the html and was quite shocked at how ugly it is coded. All the css is inline rather than hosted on separate css files. Is this normal? If yes then there is no way for web developpers to buy the generated products as I am a php developper myself and the generated code would be too horrible to work with.

Any suggestions please? In the mean time I willc hec coffee cup as I have the feeling that Xara will generate some kind of very bad code. No idea why.

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Tonight i have exported the html and was quite shocked at how ugly it is coded.

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Xara is a wysiwyg graphic website creator. The html code is not meant to be amended using html etc. To amend the website you need to reopen the xar/web file, change elements within that software and republish. Therefore you can only supply templates as xar/web files for others with that software to amend, not as templates for amendment by rewriting the code.

I see, this is really problematic and makes the product only useful to beginners unfortunately.
When you create an html design and include php code to make it more functional, it is ultra important to have a readable code. Also in a Google point of view, a validated code is extremely important.
Inline CSS is a real pain to read and only good in certain situations like emails. Oh well, the product looked great but now it is a 100% no no as my customers won't like inline css in their design.

Thanks again and good luck to all the others who are using Xara, but it is just not for us.

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Originally Posted by benoit1980

I see, this is really problematic and makes the product only useful to beginners unfortunately.
When you create an html design and include php code to make it more functional, it is ultra important to have a readable code. Also in a Google point of view, a validated code is extremely important.
Inline CSS is a real pain to read and only good in certain situations like emails. Oh well, the product looked great but now it is a 100% no no as my customers won't like inline css in their design.

Thanks again and good luck to all the others who are using Xara, but it is just not for us.

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Good points - in general - but I think the assessment might be a bit premature.

You can embed your own HTML, CSS, PHP, jQuery, etc. in a Xara web project, and still have it be editable and manageable. The practicality of doing so depends in large part on the amount of this that will be necessary for a given project.

The easiest way to do this (that I'm familiar with, at least) is via placeholders in your project. You can use these as containers for all the other types of code that your site might need. Having a superb WYWIWYG site editor (combined with a fairly brilliant graphics editor if you have Designer Pro X) let's you design and manage much of the project without having to write any code, while the placeholder feature lets you inject custom code where needed, and still make it very manageable.

By using placeholders as containers for your hand written web code, you will be able to house the whole thing in a single Xara project file, and still be able to open the placeholders and pop plain text code into them, knowing it will be injected into the code that the Xara product generates when you publish the web project.

Re: custom CSS - as discussed, Xara products are essentially pixel perfect design tools, and give you tremendous control over visual properties. That is not necessarily a "beginners" tool, but is really more of a designer's toolset, as opposed to being a coders tool. As you've been learning, Xara products generate CSS on the fly when the site is published. If you like, you can make CSS templates that override the CSS that is generated. The only issue here is that you run the risk of getting undesired results, as the Xara-generated CSS is specific to the way you've used the WYSIWYG editor to layout and theme your site, and is designed to achieve a pixel perfect rendition of what you've designed. If you were to make a CSS change, for ex, that alters text spacing or proportions, the output might not be what you expect. But it's certainly possible. This thread touches on the topic:

https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?68968-Creating-Text-Styles

I had to put together what I thought would be a simple 3 or 4 page site for an associate a couple of years ago. He was pretty particular about look and feel, so using a WYSIWYG environment that supported fast prototyping was essential, and Xara Designer Pro fit the bill. I then realized that I'd have to add data entry forms, do some front end processing, submit the data to a remote server, get the reply back, parse it, generate text based on the result, and invoke the Google Visualization API to generate graphs on the fly.

What was great was that I could build and test the needed PHP and jQuery externally using standard tools. Once it was coded and working, I was able to drop this into Xara placeholders in my Designer Pro web project, and with a bit of tweaking I had all the functionality embedded within the Xara managed website. To make changes, it's easy to open the Xara project and crack open the placeholders. With a tiny bit of naming and version control discipline -- and comments in the text code embedded in the placeholders -- it's easy to keep these fully in sync with code managed a "real" source repository external to the Xara product.

If I had to build a 100 page site that was primarily custom code, I would most likely use different tools. But the Xara tools are uniquely powerful WYSIWYG designers, and you can easily add in the additional functionality while still employing a structured, disciplined and transparent approach to management of additional code. This can be a remarkably effective combination.

Jon

Thank you for the reply.

But this still does not solve the problem of the impossibility to resell your work to third parties simply because they won't be able to inject nicely their backend code into the template.

Remember using place holders and other software tricks won't help a PHP coder who take your header, navbar and footer, have to cut then into pieces and fit them in multiple <?php include ?> files.

Then from there, many parts of the html web template will need to be modified, I give you a simple example of a picture gallery, the PHP coder(like myself) will need to remove a lot of the generated images and create a loop, from there based on what is being uploaded in the back end, the front end loops the records.

I have honestly tried to work on the exported html and just could not do it without scratching my heard thousand times.

I am used to work on clean and light code which helps me delivering projects relatively fast when I purchase clean html templates.

But it is ok, I have found another tool that replaces Xara and generates clean css.

Thanks again and good luck with it! It is a very good piece of software but only for a kind of users who do not dive deep into the code.

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Originally Posted by benoit1980

But this still does not solve the problem of the impossibility to resell your work to third parties simply because they won't be able to inject nicely their backend code into the template.

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this is not actually a 'problem'

because it is not what the program is designed to do

and no one at xara or anywhere else ever claimed that it was

I hope you find a program that will do what you want :)

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Originally Posted by benoit1980

I see, this is really problematic and makes the product only useful to beginners unfortunately.
When you create an html design and include php code to make it more functional, it is ultra important to have a readable code. Also in a Google point of view, a validated code is extremely important.
Inline CSS is a real pain to read and only good in certain situations like emails. Oh well, the product looked great but now it is a 100% no no as my customers won't like inline css in their design.

Thanks again and good luck to all the others who are using Xara, but it is just not for us.

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Egg summarised it nicely and I have to counter that Xara is not just for "beginners" and be "ultra important to have a readable code"; you are not maintaining code here. Is CSS in-line any worst than AngularJS? It is possibly to embed PHP but Xara does not provide any sort of development environment so again coding is not Xara's USP. Xara's code is validated but it has a trade in keeping design at the forefront over hiding away how it is generated.

Acorn

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Originally Posted by benoit1980

Thank you for the reply.

But this still does not solve the problem of the impossibility to resell your work to third parties simply because they won't be able to inject nicely their backend code into the template.

Remember using place holders and other software tricks won't help a PHP coder who take your header, navbar and footer, have to cut then into pieces and fit them in multiple <?php include ?> files.

...

Thanks again and good luck with it! It is a very good piece of software but only for a kind of users who do not dive deep into the code.

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I do understand your issues...and it does sound like this isn't the right tool for you. If your work is primarily based on hand-coding with standard, editable HTML and CSS templates, you should certainly be looking elsewhere - that's not what the Xara products were created to support.

Just before I sign off on the topic though, I feel that need to add a tiny bit more (and I promised to stop after this!):

I've been working in software and the IT industry in general for many years, including quite a bit of work in software and enterprise architecture. There are numerous use cases in which hybrid solutions (such as Xara plus external code / add-ons) meet the needs better than a "pure" solution (hand coded PHP, HTML, CSS). In many cases, it comes down to knowing what tools are available, how they might interface, and what the pros and cons are of a hybrid architecture. It's certainly natural to be skeptical of something unfamiliar if you don't know the available options -- while you may actually discover the hybrid approach to be very workable once you truly become familiar with the ways in which it might be used.

I'm not attempting to push you toward something that doesn't fit your needs. Just suggesting that you might not be fully aware of the ways in which the tools can work with other tools to get to the kind of end result you seek. For example: you mention a photo gallery... If you the components available in Xara Web Designer or Designer Pro aren't sufficient, tools like jAlbum are extremely powerful and configurable, and you can easily embed a jAlbum photo gallery in a Xara managed website seamlessly, complete with animation, zooming, timed carousels, etc. While the approach is different than hand-coding, you can potentially wind up with something more powerful than would be feasible to hand-code in any reasonable amount of time.

I do appreciate hand-coding, having put in thousands of hours at it early in my career, in a variety of languages and platforms. But I am also a very big fan of choosing the right tool for each purpose, and sometimes that leads me to hybrid solutions, libraries, plugins, etc. That approach requires its own homework and polishing of skills and knowledge. Again - I'm not pushing one approach over another; each will have to make their own determination. I'm just urging being fully informed in order to make the best decision.

If it's not right for you, then you should certainly find an alternative that is. At this point, I'm just adding to the conversation in case others come here with similar questions, and may find a hybrid solution to actually be the right approach for them. (ok -- off my soapbox)

Jon

Great points jonstrong,
As a coder first and designer second, it takes a little getting used to though!
I think of xara as producing 'codeable templates' rather than 'templateable code'.

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Originally Posted by sculptex

Great points jonstrong,
As a coder first and designer second, it takes a little getting used to though!
I think of xara as producing 'codeable templates' rather than 'templateable code'.

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Nice! I think that's a perfect description.