After SO MANY negative reviews of XWD anyone here have anything positive to say?

[TDolce]

I was considering looking into XWDP 16 for some website design (BUT FOR PROFESSIONAL USE) and have seen countless negative reviews ranging from how amateurish the program is, how hampered it is with poorly executed source code and the lack of professional tools when it comes to tweaking/adding code etc. to it. Has anyone here had personal experiences that either support these findings or dispute them?

Just curious.

I know I can always try and download a trial but they are usually limited and I already have enough programs on my drive without adding another trial version.

thanks,
td

[gwpriester]

I guess the question is how sophisticated a website do you need to design?

What I liked years ago about NetObjects Fusion and then with Xara when they added web design features, is the designer friendly atmosphere. And I still use Designer Pro X for website design but the sites I design do not really have to do much. Just present content, that is easy to locate and contact information.

I think Web Designer is capable of producing a fairly complex site. But as true with any software, good design comes first and requires a lot of work until you get everything working just right.

[pauland]

I used XWD for a few years and it was a superb way to build web pages easily and quickly. My clients were delighted with the end result.

You have to ask yourself what you want from web design software and how much effort are you prepared to put into learning web technologies.

Professional web developers/designers typically live and breathe web technologies and study design and web trends. They often work as part of a team and can build sophisticated sites, often data-driven with a CMS or bespoke database. These guys can do anything and they put in the hours and effort to learn their trade. They typically produce well-crafted code that is often hand-coded, highly efficient and can be edited.

Then there's the web designer who could care less about HTML and all that stuff, they just want something that works. They want a program that can make web pages and they will never be editing the HTML themselves and they could care less how pretty or efficient the web page HTML is - they won't be hand-coding HTML or frameworks. Simplicity is the key.

So, do you want simplicity without knowing how stuff works behind the scenes, or highly elegant and super flexible but needing a lot of knowledge about how the web works?

On these spectrums Xara software facilitates simplicity at the expense of flexibility and code elegance. Generally the HTML code created is bloated and inflexible and would attract scorn from any highly-skilled technically-proficient web developer. Xara makes life simple for the developer at the expense of response code layouts and concise human-readable code. The browser could care less what the code looks like and neither would most clients.

If you suck at web design Xara won't make you a better designer, it will save you from learning about HTML in any depth. You will need to compromise on some things in return. Those compromises are not acceptable to high-end technical developers, but very acceptable to some clients because you probably aren't charging at the same level as a high-end developer.

So it all depends..

[ss-kalm]

Well said Paul

[behzad]

I am totally confused and baffled by your remarks. Your assumptions and your last line that you already have ton of program and do not want another trial version. Also please post the reviews (links) to such claims. Also I have been running a profitable business designing websites for clients and it does pretty much everything I need. Maybe the people who gave Xara a bad review should sit down and get their hands dirty.

[pauland]

I am totally confused and baffled by your remarks. Your assumptions and your last line that you already have ton of program and do not want another trial version. Also please post the reviews (links) to such claims. Also I have been running a profitable business designing websites for clients and it does pretty much everything I need. Maybe the people who gave Xara a bad review should sit down and get their hands dirty.

I can imagine that XWD could get very negative reviews - it's a program that is great in it's niche, but it is a niche and to put it bluntly, for some aspects of web design it is useless.

For example, if you were working in a team of developers where hand-coding and automated page generation was important, then XWD is useless because the pages are not designed to be edited and not amenable to be used as a template for a web page generator tied to a database.

It may be a requirement that the web pages are responsive - once again a no-go area for XWD, because XWD is based on adaptive design, not responsive design.

It may be a requirement that the pages use a particular web framework such as Bootstrap or Flexbox, that is also territory where XWD will not go.

It may be a requirement that the pages are wordpress compatible or drupal compatible - again another no-go area for a program that does WYSIWYG.

Etc..

So there are plenty of places where XWD cannot go and will attract criticism - derision even.

XWD excels where the web designer has no need of the things listed above and may even not know about the technologies/techniques above. XWD is a fantastic enabler to allow people to build web pages without having to know all the ins and outs of web technology.

So please don't imply that XWD wouldn't attract criticism. In my time working with other web developers and design agencies, I would never have mentioned Xara because using a technology that is intended to enable non-technical web development would have damaged my credibility.

So let's not attack the messenger, XWD can be a beautiful program but not in all circles of web development - it fits a niche.

Really glad it's working well for you, Behzad. It's enabled a lot of non-technical people to get into web design.

[jaydear]

I tried to learn HTML, etc. but I’m not geeky enough. I then tried WDP and found it could do all that I wanted. However, you should get XDP which has the whole suite of programs in one interface because jumping in and out of seperate programs to prepare graphics and text, etc. is a huge PITA. It’s cheaper to buy XDP than the separates and it has a few extra features you may use. There has been some negativity, but I think that the Magix licensing model was the main dislike and there was some angst regarding the Cloud version. The software is loved by it’s experienced users and the price is affordable compared to other contenders.

[pauland]

I tried to learn HTML, etc. but I’m not geeky enough. I then tried WDP and found it could do all that I wanted.

Exactly! You are the target market for XWD/XDP.

[behzad]

@pauland I agree with you and also admire people like yourself that can hand code websites. I also can understand the frustration that these kind of programs bring to once an exclusive trade, now everyone is designing websites. I was trained to be a brand specialist and gone through decades of trial and difficulties perfecting my work and the need to create websites has made me to use Xara. I would surely not use it for features that you have mentioned simply because it is incapable of it. That is where wordpress comes in. But for me it works well with small businesses and jobs that I can have control over. I do not shoot down the messenger, he started to shoot down the program. Regardless, His post sounded a bit spammy to me and troll like, hey I was wrong but his wording specially his last sentence (He has enough programs) etc.. concluded his whole post to me.

[TDolce]

I am totally confused and baffled by your remarks. Your assumptions and your last line that you already have ton of program and do not want another trial version. Also please post the reviews (links) to such claims. Also I have been running a profitable business designing websites for clients and it does pretty much everything I need. Maybe the people who gave Xara a bad review should sit down and get their hands dirty.

Please don't be confused,...I was simply stating that I have many programs on my drive and I wanted to get a consensus first from the people that would KNOW more about this program before I dove in. I think Pauland gave me the exact answer I was looking for and it is greatly appreciated.
I can feel your passion in your response and I can certainly respect that. I used XWD back in version 9 and I kept banging into limitations BUT it did do a passable job for my client at the time. Things have changed since version 9 as well as an ownership change from Xara to Magix and
as I was trying to look beyond the Bubblegum Marketing hype on the Magix site to see what improvements/refinements were made to the program, I knew the people to ask regarding the deeper details were located here. It was as innocent as that.

Thank you.