Website size limitations?

[cursor]

Is there any real limitation to the size of a website created by Xara Web Designer?

[Soquili]

Hi Curtis,

Are you asking how many pages can be in a single project file?

Please provide more information about the context of your question.

[cursor]

Yes, that is what I am asking, Bill. Is there any reason why a website could not be developed that sported a couple hundred pages of material (with an responsible navigation system, of course). Are there performance issues with larger sites (particularly with those developed by Xara Web Designer)?

[Soquili]

I would assume that the number of pages you can have in a single Web Designer .web file would depend on the number and size (in bytes) of the graphics. And the available RAM on your machine.

You can use Web Designer to create a website with hundreds of pages but you would probably need many .web files to accomplish the task.

As for site performance that is totally unrelated to Web Designer and a .web file. That depends on your server, how much web space you are alloted, and the bandwidth you are alloted.

[haakoo]

Besides the things Bill already mentioned,
I think it is good practice to divide a site into sections.
-easier to maintain in xwd
-you don't have to republish the complete site.

downside is that relative links might not work or wrongly linked.
That's why you need to keep it on a piece of paper when creating a large site.
(also good practice to see what's wrong and to know what section to edit)

Hans

[cursor]

Multiple .web files? Hmmm ...

So, suppose I had a website with six main-level menu options. Might I then create six .web files to break up a large website? That seems like it might be a bit awkward, as Hans suggested, to get all the links right (not to mention the repetitive element placement).

I sense the need for perhaps a Project Manager, that would handle multiple .web modules for a single website.

[Xhris]

The design of WD is such that you should be able to produce an entire site from one document. I have however produced a site that is so huge and complex with many images, that loading in WD consumes a lot of memory, and exporting takes minutes and consumes further hundreds of MB of memory. Apparently, this kind of use of WD was not what the current version was designed for; it was designed for smallish user websites and not book-like websites like mine.

That's not to say you can't produce enormous websites using WD. You have to do what haakoo suggests in this case: split the site up over multiple WD documents. The links work fine, but you need to plan ahead and name sections in advance to ensure correct link-setting at design time. I will have to take this approach when I next make a change to my website. It makes it a little more difficult to maintain in that things are not centralised and together, but it's not much more of a hassle.

[Soquili]

Web Designer is young. Perhaps in a future release there may be a project manager. We can only wait to see how it evolves.

Using descriptive filenames should make assigning links to pages that are part of another .web file easier.

[Ted D]

I pushed WD to build a site with about 100 pages with an image on each page of about 30 k. At approximately 100 pages the site would no longer load in Xara -at least I gave up waitng. It took about 5 minutes to load into WD at about 70 pages. Judging from my experience, it seemed to have little effect up to about 40 of these pages then load time increased noticebly. Image files have to be to somewhat smaller if you need 100 pages.

[Ted D]

I pushed WD to build a site with about 100 pages with an image on each page of about 30 k. At approximately 100 pages the site would no longer load in Xara -at least I gave up waitng. It took about 5 minutes to load into WD at about 70 pages. Judging from my experience, it seemed to have little effect up to about 40 of these pages then load time increased noticebly. Image files have to be to somewhat smaller if you need 100 pages.

Or splitting the site as folks suggested earlier.