Making shift from WebStyle 4 to WebDesigner

[operaman]

A couple of quick points. I've been using WebStyle 4 together with MS Frontpage (2003) for about 3 or 4 years for several incarnations of this website: www.littleopera.ca.

Our (opera) company has recently completed a rebranding exercise to design a new logo. We are quite happy with the new logo - but now I am stumped on how to take that new design and extend it into a new (WebDesigner) template so that I can revamp my site with the new logo and extended template design.

So a couple of questions:

1. Are there any 3rd party service providers that can take my logo design and extrapolate / extend it into a new WebDesigner Template for my use?
2. Can 3rd party templates be used with WebDesigner (from any of those giant template sites?)

[steve.ledger]

Hi OM - Welcome back to TG forums,

1. My approach would be to first take a screen shot of the page and place it on a layer in XWD. I would then use this to rebuild the site design from scratch.
I'd then remove that layer before exporting and publishing.
As far as the actually logo is concerned, I assume you mean this one ( http://www.littleopera.ca/Texturemak...page4_logo.gif ) - this can be used in XWD without a problem as it is.

2. No - XWD is not a html editor and cannot import sites or templates already created in other software.

[operaman]

Hi Sledger,
Thanks for your comments / advice re making the shift from WS4 to XWD. I am indeed starting from scratch with this site as I am revamping the entire design based on recent professional logo work we'd engaged a marketing / design company to do for us. Our new redesigned logo is this: http://www.littleopera.ca/images/0910/new_loc_logo.png

The designer did a nice job for us on the logo - but didn't take the design as far as determine a new web page design for us. I think I can take it the rest of the way - but was looking for a leg up, and I would entertain the idea of hiring a (Xara or TG) professional to extend / extrapolate our new logo design into a web page template that I can use. Are there people that do that?

I haven't (so far) spent much time playing around with XWD yet - so the best way for me to move forward is probably to review the movies and jump in.

To the point about templates - do you know if there are plans to expand the templates that are currently available - perhaps making template packages available for purchase as was previously done for WS4?

Thx,
operaman

[Soquili]

Hi Operaman,

It would not surprise me if Xara does release templates for Web Designer and Xtreme 5.1 as there has been a lot of interest in both programs recently.