Having used some competing products with explicit master pages, I love them. It's great to have one place to work on all the common content on your pages - such as navbars, logos, copyright notices, etc - and have that content appear (and update) automatically on the other pages. In particular you can leave a lot of that stuff until after you've designed the other pages, which can be quite handy.

You don't have to link a page to a "master" if you don't want to; and the fearsome Serif WebPlus lets you make several master pages, for different sections of your site, should you want that.

You can get a similar functionality in Web Designer by creating a web page which you treat like a "template" for your other pages. You use "duplicate" to create a new page, and by creating objects with "Repeat on all pages" and "Update repeating objects" you can ripple changes across the whole site.

However, although it works, it feels like a bit of a kludge. Also, for a new user it is rather obscure and unintuitive (I had to seek help on this forum). Many of Xara's competitors offer a master page feature, and anyone coming from one of those (like me) would look for it, fail to find it, and uninstall Web Designer. Also, of course, anyone coming from a DTP background would do likewise.

I would like to ask Xara to add explicit master page functionality to Web Designer. It would really just be packaging the approach outlined above, so I guess most of the code is already there. Of course, I don't want it forced on anyone: it would be a feature that could be used or not, as the user prefers.

I hope you will consider it.

Thack