I am building a website for a landscaper. It is a two size responsive design with 28 pages now, perhaps more in the future for SEO. I have noticed some bugs that show up here and there now that the project is larger. I thought I would ask advice or report the bugs. The actual site is at http://risingsun-landscaping.com. It has a lot of images, needed for this industry.
I am using the 64 bit version of Xara Webdesigner Premium 365 and my machine is a fairly powerful 8-core Intel i7 with 24 GB of memory on Windows 10. The current size of the .web file is about 54 MB. I optimize images with that option in utilities. Overall I am impressed with the program -- good job! I always want more though!
Here's what I noticed. Item (4) is the worst one at the moment.
(1) More frequent Crashes
WDP365 crashes more often now that the project is large. Sometimes there is an error and the program can continue to run. Other times it just crashes and tells you it will close. I am not happy with the file recovery capability of the program during a crash as sometimes when I launch the program again, the file is not recoverable. That's not good at all. I have resorted to saving frequently and rotating between 2-3 file names in saves so I can recover the file should it crash. It appears that WDP365 auto saves the file when you try to close the program after an error -- which is like suicide for the file. I would like to request a more robust file recovery capability in this program. Seems like a good investment in your reputation.
(2) More frequent blue screens
Since Windows 10 is so horrible, I don't know if I can blame this on Xara, but I'll mention it. Same solution as above. Not much I can do about that.
(3) Opening the file WDP365 fixes mysterious file errors
Sometimes when something goes wrong, and even when it doesn't, sometimes opening a file WDP365 will issue a number of file fix errors as it processes the file. Sometimes there are something called live shares that are messed up. Sometimes objects are wrong or missing and replaced with something else (like a frame? or rectangle). I forget the exact wording ... about 4 or so different things, sometimes related to image shadows. I really like that the program is scanning the incoming file for errors and trying to fix it -- good robustness technique. But... it shows there are some reliability issues and bugs in the machine for large projects. If my file is corrupted somehow, then a more robust scanning and fixing routine is is order. So far I can continue but not sure if this will become a fatal problem in the future.
(4) Image unwanted grouping issue with variant
This one is really strange and just started happening. On the Xeriscaping page I wanted to add some images. My typical approach is (a) add the images to the regular variant including shadows, (b) anchor the images to text that is shared with the variant, which apparently automatically shares the image with the variant... not bad. (c) go to the mobile variant, turn on text repel on the images, and resize and reposition the images. That's usually fairly efficient and fast and normally a "hat's off to Xara" for a quick way to manage a variant.
Problem now is that when I put a fourth image on the main page and do this process, then go to the variant, the fourth image is somehow grouped with the second image I uploaded. I try to move either of these images around on the variant page and they move together. That should not be happening. I can't ungroup them because I don't think they are really grouped, there is some bug grouping them. I have tried to go back and un anchor and delete but sometimes this deletes the images on the main variant. I seem to be stuck at a point where I can no longer anchor the images and have them duplicate on the variant without this bug occuring. I can add unanchored images on the main variant, and perhaps the mobile, but this breaks my pattern of usage and the feature use in WDP365.
Thanks for any insights you can provide!
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