Xara Designer Pro 7 and Wordpress

[handrawn]

no-ones going to ban you for giving honest advice

[Soquili]

Because this thread topic is about web design I have moved this thread to the Xara Web Design Chat forum.

[mvssysprog]

wfcentral... a quick question....

You mentioned in your post that if the client wanted to do their own editing, that you would use Artisteer. Would you please elaborate? I'm very new to web creation, and Xara seems fairly easy to edit and replace photos.

Thanks in advance...Dave

[gwpriester]

Dave - Xara does not have the ability to let a client edit the website.

xtom has a product that he claims can do this(XT-CMS - A CMS that works with Xara - Xara + CMS Demo) I cannot vouch for this because I have never used it (I tell clients you do not buy a dog if you like to bark) but try out the demo and see if this does what you need.

[speedyp]

I'd like to add my 2 cents worth re: wordpress / Xara.

I started off building all my sites with Xara about 6 years ago. As a "non coder" I loved the way you can just drag and drop everything onto your page & get it looking exactly the way you want.

However, as a previous poster suggested, a robust CMS is a real must have these days. Clients need basic elements like a news blog, and to be able to easily update their own content at will, without having to install and learn Xara (or pay someone like me to do it for them).

Wordpress was quite challenging at first (even installing it was a test), but 6 months in, I've been able to recreate pretty much anything I could do in Xara. I've had to learn some very basic CSS skills along the way, but IMHO it is well worth the effort and I feel my sites are better for it.

I do still reach for Xara for quickly sketching out the look of a site, and it's still my first choice for creating website graphics (never got on with photoshop), but I now do all my actual site building with Artisteer & Wordpress. For those wondering about Wordpress, Artisteer is the closest thing I've found as a WYSIWYG method of working with wordpress. I'm also using an add-on called Templateer which expands the options even further.

By the way, it IS possible to integrate Xara web code into a Wordpress site, by inserting it as html in a wordpress page or "widget". I achieved this recently by designing some custom navigation in Xara & then importing it into WP. But it's a lot of hassle, re-linking your style sheets & urls. And as someone else remarked, the code ends up looking like a dog's dinner (even though it actually works ).

Don't mean to upset anyone here. Xara's a fantastic program & I like to keep an eye on it as it develops, but I design websites for a living, and I feel Wordpress is a more attractive option.

[candeeh]

Hi speedyp,

It appears that Artisteer might be the tool I need to use rolling forward, because a lot of my work is going to be Wordpress based. While I know a great deal about coding in CSS, it still takes a long time to do so. This is why I was hoping that I could use Xara and still be able to interface with a CMS like Wordpress. While I can still use Xara for the design aspects, it might be more frugal to use Artisteer, so that I don't have to design twice. however, if there is a steep learning curve with Artisteer, then it may be faster for me to continue to use Xara and CSS for Wordpress sites. I guess I will have to give Artisteer a try.

Thank you so much!

[pauland]

Just be aware that Artisteer is a completely differrent kind of design program - it is built on templates. You essentially choose a template then customise it, rather than build a design from scratch.

Nothing wrong with that, but don't expect the design freedom that Xara gives you. Because the templates are already made to suit various CMS, then naturally it's a convenient way to build a website compatible with those systems.

[candeeh]

Hi Gary,

This sounds like a good compromise which would allow me to continue to use Xara (which I love because it is so easy and intuitive!) and be able to support CMS backends. I will definitely try this avenue too!

Thank you so much!