New video released on creating a modular website

[yellowbird]

I received an email today with a tutorial for making a modular website in 15 minutes without using a template. Much more helpful than previous I've watched. Link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDl6VnPrPgs

Nancy

[gwpriester]

I got that email as well. Thanks for sharing this.

[Acorn]

Nancy, it's OK as far as it goes.
Most of what it covers does not need Web Blocks.

I've found their main benefit is to shuffle things around.
When you want to be creative, they are a drag.

The art of hiding all the Paste > Unformatted Text into the defaults blocks is pure artifice.
Factoring that part back in and you are into hours.

It didn't show that when you add something into a Main WB, it doesn't appear in the Variant so you can be back and forth.
It makes no mention of the lock-in Xara has imposed with its Layout grouping that you cannot edit into. It is easy to destroy a WB's functionality and not realise immediately.
Try opening a WB that has Embedded Graphics/Groups.

You cannot place WBs adjacent to one another so you have a highly constrained design.

Interesting that NavBars are not a WB.

Acorn

[yellowbird]

I agree with you Acorn. I don't think they are going to work for me. I tried editing a couple web blocks with the layout grouping and couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong, then I saw the layout group in the page and layer gallery. Thanks for confirming it wasn't just me. It is nice though that when you add a web block to the main variant, it automatically adds and formats it to the mobile variant.

Nancy

[bwood]

It is nice though that when you add a web block to the main variant, it automatically adds and formats it to the mobile variant.

Nancy

One of the reasons I’m using them is exactly that Nancy. You can change a few things on the mobile, but sometimes you don’t even half too.

[Acorn]

It is nice though that when you add a web block to the main variant, it automatically adds and formats it to the mobile variant. Nancy

One of the reasons I’m using them is exactly that Nancy. You can change a few things on the mobile, but sometimes you don’t even half too.

Just to be really clear, there is no formatting, Xara sets up the variant detail ahead of the game.

What Xara has gotten right this iteration is it rescales the WBs to fit any page width changes.
For that I am rather grateful.

Xara has now also allowed the WBs across variants to be moved up/down independently of one another.

Acorn

[behzad]

I personally would not use blocks much. All websites will look the same, blocks, rows and columns. Before blocks came into existence we had to design each page from scratch and that is how I worked. The ease of using Xara for doing custom designed websites was and still is amazing for people who do not want their clients or their site to look like millions of templated sites. Yes the creator had to have design sense, space and placement of items and text, all this went into the toilet with the introduction of mobile websites.