In my view, this is THE GREATEST selling feature breakthrough for Xara in many years. Many customers ask for a “WordPress” website, not realizing the actual cost and work involved.
Glad you agree with this. We get feedback from designers and end-users of Wordpress saying they hate it - because the whole process of creating and, for the client, editing Wordpress sites is really clunky, over complex. And designing Wordpress sites is about as far away from 'simple visual design tool' as you can get. You have to be more technical and more programmer than designer.

It is in Beta still, but we're continuing to work on it - there will be an update in a week or two that will enable more editing facilities, so you can edit text in groups, replace photos in groups - which are quite common on websites. And also 'download as PDF' will come soon after that. Less useful for websites perhaps (still useful though) but certainly useful for more general document editing. So you'll be able to edit and update brochures, flyers, posters, documents of all types using only your web browser, and download a PDF of it, as well as publish it online.

Regarding pricing - to be honest this has yet to be determined. We do expect that 'client access' to edit websites you've created for your clients will be free.

We expect that there will be subscription offering, one day, for Online Designer. We're toying with the idea that we'll include a free copy of Designer Pro (and automatic updates to new versions for as long as you subscribe) for those that subscribe to Online Designer options.

To be clear we're not saying desktop Designer will move to a subscription only option as some others have done. You will always, I hope, have the option to purchase one-off and then that's yours forever more, and your choice to upgrade when there's new version, or not.

But for online services, subscription is the only real option because of the ongoing costs of running the service, and people accept that. I suspect it'll be in the $10 per month region when Online Designer has gained enough functionality to make it worth that. The 'free client access' will always have more limited editing options (as it does right now) because designers do not want their clients messing with the website design - they only want to update the content and pictures, not much more.