Xara Training - Lets Build a Website Together with Designer Pro 7

[Big Frank]

I too would like to see a reply from somebody at Xara, i know they monitor these forums and maybe a project such as you have suggested would be a great marketing tool but wouldn't it be better, from your perspective, if such a course was developed by a company like lynda.com - they are ideally suited to producing and disseminating such an online training course whereas for xara it would be a bigger gamble, since their resources are finely tuned to producing the software - but, you never know, they might see it as an opportunity to break into new territory

unlike paul, i think the comments have been realistic and honest, even if your original proposition was misunderstood by many, including myself

[dbluez]

Bretgascon:
Thanks for your comments.
I did mentioned lynda.com earlier on in the thread
(I am also a subscriber there). They really do a good job with
creating these types of courses. The downside is that
you cannot ask questions. However the forum can take care of that aspect!

db

[pauland]

Lynda.com will only produce courses for products that have a certain degree of popularity and the kind of users that are happy to fork out their monthly subscription fee.

There are several other companies who work in a similar way to lynda.com and sometimes I have mentioned them.

Adobe notably produces adobe.tv, many other companies have a similar offering.

Xara/Magix I anticipate has rather finite resources and I don't think the main thrust of dbluez request is beyond them. I think there are some people here that can do it.

All that I read about dbluez request was that there is no cohesive set of video training that works through a website building project. It doesn't have to be the creation of a big site. It's more about explaining what is important when building websites and how to go about it.

There are lots of resources here already that do chunks of that job and Gary's work has tackled this quite well, but I think a video would help Xara - a lot of sales these days are helped via psoting youtube resources, etc.

There have been a few snide remarks about my comments along the way because I've supported the idea but not rushed forward to volunteer.

I currently own Xtreme Pro 4.0, and XWD 5.0. I also own the Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5. Most of my work is Flash based and mostly I work as a developer - making other people's designs work, but occassionally I do the whole shebang. Last year one of my projects had 970,000 registrations/users. The 2012 version of that project currently has 337,000 sign-ups.

I haven't upgraded for quite a while. XWD 5.0 proved excellent for quick mini-sites and I think Xara has produced excellent software for basic,static web design. I decided however, that my freelancer life really didn't benefit from upgrading my Xara software and in fact the opposite is probably true. I have to have Adobe's CS5 suite to be able to work with other people. I also find that Xara software is a crutch that makes it easier for me to avoid getting to grips with Adobe's suite. My professional clients expect me to use Adobe software and to work with the native file formats the software produces.

So, for many reasons I am not the right person to be producing a training course on using Xara Designer Pro 7 software for creating a website - not least the fact I don't have the software. I can still see the merits of the suggestion put forward by dbluez and feel dissappointment when members of a community dismisses perfectly reasonable suggestions and comes close to ridiculing them.

dbluez, covering the whole designer pro toolset in creating a website creation video tutorial, would make it long and probably tedious. You'll notice that Lynda.com and other sites tend to offer an "essentials" or "basics" version of their tutorials to make first use of the software easier and then progress to more complex offerings. You are entirely right to make the point that project-based tutorials are very useful.

Hope everyone had a great Christmas.

[handrawn]

dbluez, covering the whole designer pro toolset in creating a website creation video tutorial, would make it long and probably tedious

the modular approach would be a good one

plus you would need to make allowance for those features that [for me anyway] it is difficult to imagine working into a website building tutorial [eg: cmyk; pantone; pdf/x export] - so yet more work....

I think those of us who have been around here a while just don't see this happening because of our understanding of how things are - but I too would be most pleased if Xara/Magix picked up on this

I don't see ridicule - dbluez has met serious and maybe a tad world-weary doubt in a very together way.. I wish it well

[Big Frank]

yeah, some xara-sponsored tutorials might not be a bad idea, but using every tool in the xdp7 toolkit to create one website is a tall order, and are you going to leave out the tweaksets (you shouldn't) or the extended functionality developed by users on here or xara-users (you shouldn't)

honestly, i can't see it happening, although it'd be nice if it did