Cleverly, the end result is a unified HTML file, the appearance of which dynamically changes to suit the device on which it’s being viewed.
In practice, it’s a neat solution to a potentially tricky problem, allowing you to cater for multiple device types while retaining control of how your site will look. The interactive tutorial, found in the Design Gallery, is an excellent introduction to the softwareĬreating multiple versions of a site sounds tedious, but the linking of content between versions helps minimise the amount of work involved. The desktop version, for example, has a navigation bar with mouseover highlights, while mobile users will see a more simple drop-down menu. Each version has navigation and interactive features customised for the target platform. Pictures and header text aren’t linked, and this means you can tweak them to suit the screen size more easily. In this template, body text content is linked between the three versions, so edits to one replicate automatically to the others. This contains three versions of the same scrolling site displayed on three different tabs, and these are configured for desktop, tablet and smartphone browsers.
To get a better idea of how Web Designer handles varying screen widths, we started building a website using the Vue Supersite template. It seems odd that the content installer, an optional utility that adds content including fill styles and dictionaries, doesn’t let you download all content in a one-time operation. The process is slowed down somewhat by the fact that some of the included content must be downloaded before it can first be used. While we found thumbnails in the designs gallery quicker to load than in version 9, they’re still a little on the small side, and it’s often necessary to open a template or drag an element to the page to get a full idea of what it looks like. You can choose which content is linked between variants edits to linked content are replicated between variants The gallery is also where you’ll find an excellent and interactive tutorial.Īdvanced features include support for Google Fonts, which is a collection of more than 600 free fonts that are hosted by Google rather than your own server, and the new Supersites feature, which lets you present a small website in a single scrolling page instead of separate pages. The gallery contains many shapes, page elements and widgets that you can use to add features to your web page. There’s also a designs gallery, and you can use this to create a new site from a range of available templates, many of which make a surprisingly good starting point. It’s easy to start with one of Web Designer’s templates and customise it with your own content Minimised to the right are frames holding the various line, fill and picture options. Layers are used for transitions, an example of a transition being the behaviour triggered when the user moves their mouse over an element. Where pages have layers, these can be displayed and hidden again by clicking the arrow next to the thumbnail.
By default, the site you’re creating is displayed in a large window to the left, with its pages navigated via thumbnails to the right. Xara Web Designer 10 Premium’s clean interface provides an editing experience similar to desktop publishing, and surprisingly, given the wide range of features available, the interface is uncluttered. In use, this software is much like the previous edition, which is no bad thing. Unfortunately it’s only available in the Premium version we’re reviewing here, not the standard version. Fortunately, version 10 sees the introduction of Responsive Website Design, a feature aimed at addressing just this issue. We’ve long been impressed with its sophistication and ease of use, but when we reviewed version 9 last year we were critical of its lack of support for the highly variable screen sizes found on mobile devices. Xara’s Web Designer is a WYSIWYG web editor that lets people without HTML or web skills create professional-looking websites.