Xara Outsider design competition.

[Soquili]

Xara created the contest and decides on the rules.

Personally I think using facebook to gain votes shows a lack of integrity and confidence.

[covoxer]

That turns it into the spamming abilities competition.

If this will continue, I'm afraid we can expect some proper reaction from the other authors or their supporters. And everyone knows well that it's a trivial task to make a hundred of votes here without anything like FB.

So if you want to support some other design - do your best to support it by any means necessary! Use FaceBook, call your friends, make whatever you want, which is all of course legal in this case. And protect your vote!!!

[Scotty]

I was under the impression the contest was for new templates. I seen some sites there that are bonified websites and some I beleive were displayed here for comments and suggestions.

[Pixelpusher]

As one who is in the running, I had no idea that votes were being generated from Facebook. I assumed that it would be only from other Xara designers. I do have a business and I did use Xara to design the web site for said business. I liked my design well enough to enter it into the contest. As you can see from the results so far, it isn't fairing too well in the votes but that's OK because I like it and I had a lot of fun creating it. The photos that are on the front of that site are also other sites that I have created using WD6. If I were to win, great, if not, I still had fun and am still having fun.

Good sport all the way around whether my site wins or not.

[steve.ledger]

► http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost...67&postcount=7

[taffim]

Hello All,

Wow, the first time I post something and I get everyone up in arms.

Certainly not my intention. I got excited when I saw in the Outsider that there was going to be a web design competition - something I thought I could actually compete in. So I entered. I was even more excited when I saw that my site was chosen for the vote. I've been using Xara for a few years now and have learned by watching your Youtube videos. You guys are very talented and I strive to achieve your greatness.

I appreciate everyones brutal honesty about my design. Although I am proud of the site I created, I will take your suggetions to mind on my next web project.

I would like to address the Facebook thread.
1. If I broke any Xara rules by posting on Facebook, asking my friends and family to vote to help me win $100 of Xara upgrades, then by all means, please discard any votes that originated from Facebook. I don't like breaking rules. NOTE: I do not own the PRO version, so winning $100 bucks would help me get it.
2. If this is a web design contest*, then I would argue that SEO and SEM should be concidered valid uses. The purpose of having a nice website is to attract customers and visitors. As web designers, we should always be thinking how to attract more traffic to our customers site (at least I do). Social and Viral marketing are hot topics today and I was only trying to put it to use. It's the sheep who buy our products.

As to the W3C coding issues. I will take full blame since I did not check the code after I exported it from Xara. I used the raw html that Xara HTML filter generated. I did add Google tracking code in the Web Properties tab.

Again, I didn't mean to get anyone upset ~ I'm just trying to make a living over here.

I hope we all can still be friends

Taffim

* The Xara Outsider contest is for the entertainment of your fellow Outsider readers and of course the glory – but we’ve also added an incentive in the form of Xara or MAGIX software of your choice up to the value of $100 (or a credit to your Xara account for use against future purchases). Check out the MAGIX options here. The theme for this quarter’s contest is web page design. Your page(s) must be created in Xara Xtreme or Web Designer. Simply submit the xar or web file and a URL where we and the voters can see the page(s). In the April issue we will display a shortlist of our choice for Outsider readers to vote on. The deadline for entries is: 15th April.

[gpholman]

I'm a bit late commenting but I'd like to make some general observations about these sites that could apply to any site generated by XWD.

Having noticed that some of these sites are noticeably slow to load I used Firebug (a website analysis and debugging plug-in for Firefox) to see just how large all the image files were on the first 3 on the shortlist. I also did the same for Xara's home page for comparison. Please see the attached PDF for details. You will see that the largest site has almost 1Mb of image files on a single page (N.B. this isn't a gallery page either!).

It seems to me that the root is down to many images that could be JPEGs being unnecessarily exported as PNGs, and with this in mind I'd like to suggest a couple of possible changes to XWD that might be of use:

1) Have a web page image analysis option (e.g. a list of all images on each page, sorted by size and totaled by page). This would notify the user if the total size of images on a page exceeded a threshold (which could be set by the user) and would provide recommendations for optimizing / reducing the total size. Ok some images will almost certainly repeat on pages and therefore only load once but this could be factored in.

2) XWD will export photos, by default, as JPEGs (PNGs are inefficient in comparison to JPEG for this sort of image). Likewise XWD will choose PNG for images that mainly contain less colour variation than you would get with a typical photo (JPEG will still usually produce smaller file sizes but PNGs produce far superior results in this situation). I've noticed that when text is grouped with a photo then Xara will export the result as a PNG by default and not a JPEG even though the image is still predominantly a photo. Could XWD be adjusted to view this as a photo (which it is!) and therefore continue to default to JPEG?

3) http://www.axeon.ro/ has some PNGs that sit on top of a background JPEG. They have a rollover effect which alters the image when you mouseover. Because these images are photos they produce very large files as PNGs, whereas JPEG would be far smaller. However they need the PNG alpha transparency ability to allow the JPEG background to show cleanly around them. In this instance is it viable / technically possible to have XWD merge the alpha transparency portion of the PNG with the JPEG beneath it and export his as a JPEG (I don't mean by this to alter the background JPEG - this would reamain untouched). This would give the same effect as the alpha PNG but being a JPEG it would be far smaller. Admittedly I'm well out of my technical level with this idea so I could be talking complete codswallop!

[Soquili]

FYI the Xara home page is not created with XWD.

As for your #3 suggestion, the jpg file format does not support any form of transparency. However what you suggest can be done using XWD5 or XWD6, but not automatically. The user of the program must force the export of jpg files rather than the png format. The images must be correctly sized and placed using whole pixels to prevent antialiasing that may show in the final output.