This is a post after a LONG time but for the past few days I have been thinking about xara web designer. I have not used it in a few years as I moved onto adobe muse, which was amazing upto a year or so ago but then they started getting lazy in it's development, not just features but basic compatibility issues. Anyway the short of it is adobe muse is no longer in active development and adobe really butchered the end of life process for it and pretty much destroyed people's faith in them and many developers out there simply stopped susbscribing to creative cloud.

Now I come to the reason for this post and it's really a question and astonishment at once. When news of muse's demise happened a couple of months back muse users (of which there are tens of thousands) started to look for an alternative, even though the software is still working and will do so until there is a major change in browsers and muse sites start to fall apart. Anyway when this happened many, many companies which offer web design software started posting youtube videos, making posts in muse forums, on facebook groups, twitter, adverts etc etc. to push their own web design solutions, and at the forefront of that is webflow, they have pretty much taken 75% of muse users and are now laughing all the way to the bank.

So where was Xara when all this was happening, I have some sense of loyalty to xara as web designer helped me to diversify my business away from printing to web design, so I'm shocked that this has not been picked up, expecially as both web designer and muse were so close in terms of how one designs a website, they cater to non-coders and now because of their active marketing webflow have turned 70% of muse users (remember there are tens of thousands out there) onto a solution which works completely differently and has a steep learning curve. I have yet to see anywhere xara reaching out to muse users or heard of anyone pushing it in forums or social media.

We were luckly and moved to wordpress a while back and are moving any muse sites onto wordpress. It's just sad that xara have missed out on this amazing opportunity.