To all who make big sites with xara

[behzad]

I like to know your experience with making large sites, most likely bigger than 10 pages, with features found on wordpress, blog, database etc..
What has been your challenges, would you do it again of pick another program/platform.

[hoja]

I have built large business websites with Xara in the past but would very clearly no longer recommend anyone using Xara for this sort of work.

When I did these sites +5 years ago I had a decent graphic design background but no web coding skills. I had clear Design ideas for my websites and found
CMS too bloated and too restricting. At that time I was delighted to see that one could up a document pretty much in the way one works in a page layout program
– and simply make a website out of it. Fantastic.

But things have changed considerably in recent years.
Today there's absolutely no way around delivering responsive websites. Yet one can not create such inside Xara. All you can do is create static
variants in different sizes. This for small sites may be acceptable and even lets you perfectly fine tune the appearance on all device sizes. But if you have a 50
pages website with three variants you'll end up effectively managing 150 pages. Things get even less manageable if you plan publishing in
more than one language. CMS automate all this stuff and resize your content as needed. Multilingual content is easy to create and maintain as well.

The other thing I had to learn in the meantime is the crucial importance of Search Engine Optimization for any sort of content one actually wants to get found.
Xara websites as HTML sites are slim in comparison to CMS like WordPress and the like – which is a good thing for Search engines. But apart from that Xara
only offers a very basic set of tools to help Search Engines interpret your website data. Xara uses no structured data, replaces meaningful image names with
numbers, doesn't even tell search engines about the website language. In the whole Xara program and documentation the word Search Engine Optimization
doesn't even appear... But SEO really is the foundation for having content rank well. If your content doesn't show on page one and you don't do a lot of offline
marketing (pointing to your web-offering) you have wasted your time. All popular CMS are extremely optimized towards delivering data Search Engines can
interpret well. As soon as one gets lazy and skips descriptions or alt-texts a some tool will warn you.

With CMS it is pretty hard to author poorly optimized websites.
With Xara poorly optimized is the default output. It really is.

One obviously doesn't need a CMS for a SE optimized website. One can use a simple HTML-Site too – those who know what's missing in the source code can even
implant the missing bits to a Xara website. The average user doesn't know these tricks though. And even advanced users still have to deal with manually setting
up each and any page in all sizes and wire together separate websites for multilingual content.

[behzad]

Thank you, that was very insightful. I hope to hear others with their experiences.

[Pommes]

I used to build a big site with my team a long time ago. Our common problem is that we could not control broken links/pages because pages sometimes are not linked and there was broken navigation. The second problem is that we couldn't really correctly optimize the page for the search engines. Hope you will do a better job!

[RKissane]

I have setup our company's website using Xara. I am running 70 pages add in the variant then 140 pages. No problems with using Xara.

Our site is static in that I make changes every couple of months to couple of pages. Maybe add in some new pages once in a while.

As far as SEO, I rank on the first page for a lot of my key words. Goggle has made changes to algorithm and everybody is have a harder time staying on the top. Does not matter what program you use. The main key to SEO is good content and coming in 700-2000 words a page.

As far as WordPress, we looked at having our site done with it when we were converting over from our old site. Our Web master and a firm that specializes in doing these type sites said it would take to much time to recreate in WordPress and get very expensive. One of the things in my research about WordPress is they will do an update and then some widgets you are using will have to be updated. Some authors of these widgets will not update for very long periods and your site can have broken components on it. Also consider the Theme for your site because they can be impacted by some updates. I should point out that I have not been closing following WordPress so somethings may have been improved.

If you are going to be constantly updating and changing pages then WordPress maybe the best option. If your pages do not change that much then you may still want to consider Xara. There is advantage to either way you go.

Last question, do you know how to do HTML programing and setting up CSS pages?

Ray

[behzad]

Thank you guys. I have worked with wordpress and joomla before and then switched to webplus and finally to xara. Just a quick question Ray, are all the 70 pages saved as one file on your computer or your working on smaller file sizes due to memory etc. I guess if there is not much graphics then this would not be an issue.

There is an advantage of working with xara and that is, if the site gets hacked, I can update it in minutes compared to hours with wordpress. I still have a few clients site on wordpress and everytime wordpress is updated, I panic thinking what if the plugins no longer work. That takes away my production time checking the site etc... Something that clients do not care to pay for.

[nobbyy]

RKissane and behzad - I am really pleased that you raised the issue of updates to plug-ins to Wordpress a lot of clients ask for wordpress but have no concept of its limitations in terms of customisation or the potential impact of updates and potential consequential loss of functionality or cost to resolve.

The vast majority of my sites are built with Xara and I find it excellent in terms of producing exactly the look you want but am equally frustrated by the use of variants.

Suppose there is no real one size fits all.

[hoja]

There is an advantage of working with xara and that is, if the site gets hacked, I can update it in minutes compared to hours with wordpress.
I still have a few clients site on wordpress and everytime wordpress is updated, I panic thinking what if the plugins no longer work. That takes
away my production time checking the site etc... Something that clients do not care to pay for.

I can't see that advantage.
Replacing a cms database with an automatic backup is no more difficult than re-exporting a Xara file. I don't feel the panic you describe in terms of
breaking plug-ins either. The reality is that Xara also relies on a lot of third party code which is out of reach for the makers of Xara and which may
eventually break: That stone age Highslide Lightbox Plugin and everything having to do with web-animations are just a few examples. Xara contains
a lot of encapsulated code, while cms-modules are constantly updated.

[behzad]

Good point guys, your all correct. @nobbyy, I just stick to main website size and a mobile variant. Did that for my latest project and client is pleased. I know a guy on muse that did 6 break points (variants) and has to position and adjust elements on all which is nuts.

[RKissane]

Thank you guys. I have worked with wordpress and joomla before and then switched to webplus and finally to xara. Just a quick question Ray, are all the 70 pages saved as one file on your computer or your working on smaller file sizes due to memory etc. I guess if there is not much graphics then this would not be an issue.

I have everything in one file. There are a large number of pictures on the site and several graphics and a small slide show on the main page. No problem with memory.

Ray