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Building a Web Site That Won't Change Often? Consider Xara Web Designer MX

01.05.2012
There's a lot of pressure these days for every business, big or small, to maintain a blog. However, if you don't have the staff capacity, inclination, or writing savvy to maintain one--or really have nothing to say on a regular basis--a static website is still the next best thing. And for $50, Xara Web Designer is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to create your professional site.

Xara Web Designer MX 8 has fortunately kept the simple and intuitive UI from the Xara 7 products (, , ). The fly-out menu on the right side contains all of the templates and clip art bundled with the program. Simply drag and drop the item you want, whether it's a complete website template, individual page, button, header, navbar, or what have you.

Oddly, Xara Web Designer's templates all seem to measure about 770 pixels wide--just wider than a SVGA screen, and allowing for a very large border on a XVGA screen. Even though Xara Web Designer MX 8 has a function to extend the bottom of the page, the pages are static; and Xara Web Designer is truly WYSIWYG: Everything you place on the page will show up exactly as you place it, regardless of the browser size of the reader. Also, much of your Xara-designed site won't work if your end user is using NoScript or has scripting disabled in the browser. If this seems problematic, try (also $50) or ($45) both slightly harder to use, but more technically-focused website design tools.

If you have design experience, you won't need to use Xara Web Designer's templates. Instead, you can create an SVGA (760 pixels wide), VGA (640 pixels wide), or XVGA (955 pixels wide) Web page from scratch. Xara's built-in tools for image editing, quick shapes, drawing, and fonts make it easy, and this is one area Xara Web Designer really excels.

One-click link editing is also a great new feature in Xara Web Designer MX 8. Simply click once on your navbar or link and a popup box allows you to create, change, or remove the hyperlink address.

I wish Xara Web Designer had an easier process to create Web-usable graphics from the less-than-Web-friendly fonts (i.e. anything from a typical fonts collection) that are available (a "convert to JPEG" or similar button, much like Illustrator has a "convert to curves" feature for fonts, would be a fabulous addition). I also miss the functionality of seeing the individual objects within each layer, a feature that's not available in Xara Web Designer, but is a great addition in $300 Xara Designer Pro.