Is web designer the right software for me?

[JimmyJazz]

I am a seasoned veteran of Xtreme pro so a migration to using web designer would be a perfect fit for me.

However I do have some reservations for what I need it to actually do.

I am in the process of planning what will be quite a large review site & I have been testing some of the free CMS packages but none can really deliver what I want so I decided to download web designer & trial it.

The design functionality is a dream to work with (I expected it to be) so this will never be an issue.

What I am worried about is I will be adding extra pages every day & I was also wondering if anyone has designed any large sites (200+ pages) & did it affect the page load speed?

With updating daily I have read some issues with some people making a change & the whole site uploading as opposed to just the updates, obviously this would not be ideal.

With all my existing websites I always use cpanel to upload the files directly, is this method feasible with web designer?

This way I only update the actual files that have changed, is it easy to locate which files you have made changes to or any new page that has been created?


I have seen in web designer that each page is loaded one after the other, 200+ pages would be a lot to wade through; is it possible to create one site & divide the site up by cities?

e.g......homepage url would have X amount of pages, homepage url/london would have x amount of pages, homepage url/birmingham would have X amount of pages..............

Could I then sub-divide these pages by categories; e.g.........homepage url/london/hotels.........london/nightlife..........london/arts..........etc

I would be interested in anybodies thoughts on any of the above.

[JimmyJazz]

Hmmmm! Maybe I posed toooo many questions for one post

Has anyone got any opinions on any of the questions I asked, no need to try to wrestle the whole beast to the ground

[zaphodeist]

I'd do it by making each division and sub-division separate .xar [or .web if using XWD] files and exported as such. Links would have to be relative of course and it seems more work, but much easier to maintain.

EDIT I'd also suggest going for Xara Designer Pro btw - everything in one package

[pauland]

Some people build larger sites by splitting them up - so you can do that. You can do your own uploading, but that bypasses the current softwares mechanism for minimising upload traffic.

WD isn't really designed for such large sites and so I would probably look for a CMS-based solution that had more facilities for handling so many pages. It's not an easy call - larger sites need more care to administer. Netobjects Fusion might also be a contender for a large site.

If you wander/search talkgraphics you'll find this topic has arisen several times.

[zaphodeist]

An example I did when XXP5 came out last year ... might explain what I meant

[JimmyJazz]

Hey you guys thanks for your input

I will delve deeper into the forum to see if I can find any further info if it has been discussed before.

One question though, does anyone know if a large web designer site loads at an acceptable speed?

[covoxer]

The site loading speed is basically the same as for the hand made sites.
The bulk of the loading time is loading of images used. WD optimizes all images automatically (to the smallest acceptable resolution), but sometimes you may have to manually force the export type to be JPG for some elements that are exported as PNG by default to further optimize the performance.

[steve.ledger]

Web Designer sites are no different to any other sites made with any software.
It's the content that counts and that's down to you, the designer.

Web Designer outputs valid HTML code. You could code it by hand in notepad with the same content if you liked.