Build professional, attractive, feature-packed websites - no previous experience required
Xara Web Designer 7 is a powerful web editor that makes it easy to create stylish, high quality websites, even if you've no HTML skills.
How easy? The program includes a Design Gallery that includes plenty of sample websites. Find one you like, double-click it and a complete multi-page site will open. Replace the text and images with your own content and you're done - the site could be ready in under an hour.
The templates are just the start, though. You can also customise your pages with new text panels, buttons, headings and more. The Design Gallery includes plenty of attractive clipart, photos and icons that you can drag and drop onto the page. And there are all kinds of effects that you can apply to every area of a page, from giving text soft shadows, to creating mouseover effects (changing an image when a mouse moves over it, say), pop-ups (click a thumbnail to display the full-sized image), transparency and more.
The site really gets interesting when you begin to add widgets, objects that support some kind of dynamic content. There are widgets to display "contact me" forms, media players, YouTube videos, Flickr slideshows, Google maps, RSS feeds, your latest tweets or Facebook updates, even chatrooms or your own forums. Just drag and drop the widget you need onto the page, tweak its settings and you're usually ready to go in a minute or two.
Once your site is ready, the built-in FTP-based publishing tool will quickly upload the site to your server. But if you don't have a web hosting account yet, that's not a problem. Web Designer 7 can also help you create an account with Magix-Online that will give you 500MB of server space and your own URL (http://yourname.magix.net/public) for free.
Xara Web Designer 7 Premium goes further and offers tools to create PowerPoint-like presentations for the web, for instance.
There’s also automatic site map generation, a favicon designer, and support for HTML5 video, so you can create iOS-friendly sites that play videos without requiring Flash.
And you get extra widgets, additional site templates, advanced graphics tools and a whole lot more. The list price doubles to $99.99 as a result, but it still looks like good value to us, particularly if you’ll use the new presentations feature – that could justify the extra cost all on its own.
Review by Mike Williams.
