Screen compatibility and other questions

[Metro Golden]

Hello All!

I designed my website entirely with Xara Extreme 4. As a fixed website and with a black background, different screen resolutions may result in white empty spaces on a viewers monitor. I'm a little out of touch with the new products ie Xara Designer Pro 6, Xara Photo and Graphic Designer 6 and Xara Web Designer 6 to know my best options for the programs ability to write html code to remedy this situation or even for overall web design. Also is web design basically out of "Photo and Graphic Designer 6" and is there meaningfully more capability for web application in "Designer Pro 6" over "Web Designer 6" to justify the cost if that's my main application? Please let me know what you think. I also tried to hack around with html code to "stretch" the background for various screen resolutions without too much success - would you consider this worth trying to do on an individual page basis? I appreciate any opinions or guidance you may be able to provide. Thanks.

[gwpriester]

Hey MG It's been a while.

One of the really nice advances in Designer Pro and Web Designer 6 is the ability to have both a custom page color or texture as well as an independent background texture or color. You can see an example of this in one of last year's Xara Xone tutorials http://www.xaraxone.com/tutorials/nov10/ The page background is white but it could have also been any color or texture. In this year's tutorial format the page color is light gray and the background color is a darker gray.

Setting this up is as easy as holding down the Ctrl key and dragging and dropping a color or texture on the page or pasteboard area for the background.

[pauland]

Metro Golden, you'll find that the vast majority of websites are made to a fixed size, centered within the actual width. This gives better design options over sites that stretch. In practice, the centered sites use a background (as per Garys suggestion) to let the site sit within a coloured setting. None of this is peculiar to Xara software.

Take a look at

http://www.xaraxone.com/ (not designed with Xara software), fixed sized design sitting on a coloured background.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ - doing exactly the same - fixed design, centred.
http://www.adobe.com/ - centred design on a coloured background.

So the Xara software is no different in this respect - fixed, centred design.

Paul

[Metro Golden]

Thanks Gary, it's been a while since I was a regular poster, but I've been peeking in now and then.
It's good to know both Pro and Web have this capabiltiy. I'll have to look up a comparison between the two regarding features specific to web design.

Thanks Paul, I wasn't about to leave the realm of fixed design as I'm feeling like an old dog and not so eager to learn a whole new program at this point. It's just in ol' Extreme 4 I couldn't expand the border out for various resolutions. I've always appreciated the community we have here for assistance, support and appreciative sharing of ideas and artwork.