About Xara Web Designer

Xara Web Designer

Introduction

It's evident that the vast majority of websites are of a graphical nature. The presentation of your website matters a great deal. You want a competent, professional looking website. We believe you should not have to use multiple different tools - graphics and HTML editing - to create your website. We believe you should have complete freedom to include any text, graphics, photos anywhere on the page.

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Websites are as much about graphical presentation as content.

Creating websites should be like creating PDF files - you should not need to know anything about what happens 'under the hood'. You would not expect to edit the PDF file data directly. You should not need to know, or even see, the HTML that goes into creating your website.

What Makes Xara Web Designer Different

Traditional web authoring tools are really just HTML editors - they are designed to create text layout. They provide few, if any, graphical capabilities. You are expected to use separate graphics tools to create your web graphics and photos. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of websites are primarily graphical designs, where the text element plays only a minor part in the overall design. In other words perhaps 90% of the effort required to design an attractive website is of a graphical nature.

Traditional web authoring tools tend to be complex to use, are often aimed at programmers, and provide features such as HTML and script editing.

Xara Web Designer is different. It is primarily a graphics tool and takes a new approach to web design. It allows you, the web author, freedom to place anything anywhere on the page - text, photos, graphics. You create your page in a WYSIWYG page layout way (What You See (in Web Designer) Is What You Get (on the final web page)). It provides all the graphics features you are ever likely to require. No other software required.

Further, it provides an easy way to create interactive effects, such as pop-up photos, graphics, or mouseover effects that are commonplace on the web. You can even create and include animated Flash. You can repel text around objects on your page, or have non-straight edges to your text - things that are traditionally very difficult, even for advanced webmasters / HTML coders.

And it does all this with not a single line of HTML or script required. Indeed Web Designer is not an HTML authoring tool - it provides no HTML code view, and no abilities to program Javascript. But it does provide the easiest, fastest way to create great looking websites, with none of the complexities or restrictions usually associated with HTML authoring.

And it includes a wide range of pre-designed web templates to get you started (whole pages and collections of individual items such as buttons, text panels, etc).


For The Professional Web Designer - A Rapid Prototyping Tool

Web Designer provides unprecedented flexibility as a rapid prototyping tool. For the first time you can focus purely on the design of your website, with almost no limitations to your page layout. Web Designer provides all the graphics tools to create optimized graphics, photos and more, and creates cross-browser, cross-platform, standards compatible HTML.

Forget creating mock-up websites in Photoshop. With Web Designer you can create advanced, graphically complex websites from scratch - and websites that work with real HTML. It offers one-click site-wide re-coloring, ultra simple mouseover effects and pop-ups. It's a true object oriented, vector based composing environment. It produces cross-browser XHTML compatible, CSS layer based designs (Web Designer layers map directly to CSS layers).

This product takes over from Webstyle - which will now be retired. There's not much that Webstyle did that can't be done in Web Designer, and there's a LOT more that Web Designer can do.


-The Xara Team