New Xara Design Pro User and New To Forum

[M_Long]

Hello everyone,

I am new to Xara and to this forum. I purchased the Xara Design Pro x8 and have begun playing around with designing a website. I am a photographer/artist and want to create a new website to show my portfolio and sell my orginal paintings and drawings. I used to use Photobiz for my website needs when I was offering portrait and wedding photography, however, I am no longer offer that type of work. However, I am still offering fine art photographs, painting, and drawings. I am hoping that I can design a nice website to fit my needs with Xara. I like to have control over my site so that I can make my own changes as I see fit so I thought that Xara would be the perfect fit for me since I do not know how to write code.

I've been trying to find others who have used Xara to design a website for their art/photography but have not found many with my searches here. I would greatly appreciate it, if any of you have sites designed (using Xara) for this purpose, if you would share your website with me to help me get a better idea of what can be done with Xara. I did find one by Alan (I can't remember his user name) and I really liked how his home page had a flash style display of images across the page. I was hoping to do something like that. However, I am having trouble figuring out how to make the images automatically scroll on their own. I also want to have seperate gallery pages for different type work (i.e., paintings, drawings, and photographs, etc). Is this simple to accomplish? I am not stranger to working with many different graphics software and I feel like I'm making this software more difficult then it really is. LOL!

Suggestions would be greatly appreciated as well as any tips on the best options for slide shows and gallery displays, etc.

Thanks
Michelle

[mwenz]

Welcome, Michelle.

http://www.talkgraphics.com/forumdis...ra-Web-Gallery

Just a few "doors" down in the forum structure is an area for showing sites made with Xara products. These also appear for in-progress sites in this section.

Take care, Mike

[M_Long]

Hi mwenz

Thanks for the response. I did look through many of those threads as well as tried to search for what I was looking for and didn't find any sites that were geared toward photography/artists work. So, I thought I would post here to specifically ask if anyone has a site as such or maybe someone knows of a photography/art site(s) that were created using Xara. I can't find anyone I know that has photography site that are using Xara. Everyone around here seems to use Word Press. However, I don't know how to write code and I have no desire to learn how to write is and I also don't want to be stuck with one design. I want the freedom to change my design and layout as I choose.

Michelle

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics

I'm a graphic and website designer. I designed my entire website, edited the photos, and created all the graphics in Designer Pro X.

www.gwpriester.com

[wizard509]

Welcome to TG Michelle, It's not clear what you are really wanting. Are you looking for ideas, or, how to accomplish a specific task? I don't do websites myself but there are many here that do and will be more than happy to answer your questions.

[M_Long]

Thanks for the sample sites gwpriester. The couple you did for the photographers and artist was what I was looking for. I have a question.... The slide show on the front page of Santiago Perez's website, did you use a flash widget in Xara or did you use an external source? These are just a few things I'm trying to accomplish. I also want to set up an e-commerce section (I assume thats how I should refer to it). I want people to purchase original paintings directly from my site rather then through my Fine Art America site. I want to keep that site for "print" sales only. One other concern I have is how to protect my images from being copies, printed, and/or downloaded from my site. My Photobiz site had a built in system that protected the images from being copied. I'm not a huge fan of copyright logos across the image, but, if there is no other way to do it then thats what I might have to do.

Wizard509.... I was interested in finding some sample photography and art website just to see what they have been able to do with Xara and to give me some ideas what to expect with the program. It helps me to see sites that are related to my product.

One other thing.... can any of your explain to me how I keep this site for automatically logging me out if I'm not active for a certain amount of time. I'm finding that I have to log in every time I want to reply to the thread.

[gwpriester]

Michelle

I used a Flash slide show application for Santiago's animation. There are quite a few good ones. A new site Frobee Slideshow Maker lets you create your site on-line. http://www.frobee.com/slideshow-maker/ I used Flash Slideshow Maker http://www.flash-slideshow-maker.com/ for Santiago's animation and also for the Ortega Wine Label Design site. They have way to many options. I just used the Basic option which creates a simple Flash .swf file and the Photo Only template.

There should be a check box when you log in that says something like, Keep me logged in or Remember me, or something like that.

[M_Long]

Thanks for the input and the followup email gw. It is very helpful. Its good to know when I get deeper into it I have a place to go to get a little help. Can you tell me if there is manual somewhere that can be downloaded?

[steve.ledger]

There should be a link to the PDF manual in your purchase confirmation email.
The manual is not freely available to non-licensed users, so you won't find a public link.

[M_Long]

Thanks Sledger. I will re-read the confirmation email to see if they sent it to me.