Ideas and experience needed

[tomcat]

Hi, I use Xara Designer since years - in Version X9, most of time for creating designs and pictures. Now I upgraded to Xara Designer Pro X yesterday.
One of the reasons for the update was my interest in webdesign. I tried to create a website with one of the included templates and it worked. The sample sites look very good. So far ok.

All of the descriptions and samples are small sites, only an handfull of pages. My site, that I want to overhaul includes actually about 150 pages, multiple hierarchies in navigation and so on. Actual it is created and managed in CMS (Joomla). Adjusting its layout needs big knowledge in HTML, CSS ...

What I'm interested at the moment is: is Web-Designer the right tool to manage bigger sites, like mine? Is it possible, to create the layout and content of the pages with Xara designer and transfer them via web-designer to Joomla? Has anyone of you experience with similar projects?

I hope that you understand what I want and give me an answer. Thanks a lot in advance.

[gwpriester]

Hi Tom

I have not used NetObjects Fusion for years but I used to prefer it for large sites because it has a flow chart window that makes it easier to see the entire site at one glance and to rearrange pages.

Designer Pro X and Web Designer use a single column which works, but is a bit more cumbersome for managing large site.

I prefer Designer Pro X over Web Designer Premium because you have all the tools and features for designing, photo editing, and web site building in one package. And I prefer Designer Pro X over NetObjects Fusion for the same reason.

[tomcat]

Hi Gary and thanks for your statement.

I think you're right. I know Netobjects Fusion as well and I used different programs to manage my sites. Finally I use Joomla, a free content management system. It is easy to use and it does a great job. I was trying webdesign with Xara's webdesigner (I use the built-in version of Designer pro) to find out if it will help me, doing the job. The generated pages by Xara are working, looking good and are fast done. But the generated pages are diffenent from those made with other systems. Big code in HTML and CSS, width-fixed-pages, just to mention some. I think that managing multiple pages in one file is possible up to a small amount (maybe 20-50), if they don't change too often. Multiple-file-design will get very hard to manage, I guess. All the work with nav-bars, links etc. have to be done manually.

What I will try to do is making some single pages with webdesigner and export the code to joomla. Especially the graphical possibilities are greater with Xara. I hope this works and it will help me, getting my sites in a better graphical shape. We will see.