Xara Web Designer Premium 7

Xara Web Designer is unlike any web design software you will have seen before; an easy template based solution that gives you total page design freedom, no HTML skills required. Comes in 2 versions, Web Designer and Web Designer Premium; Premium offers advanced web design features.

Features

Why Web Designer?

Seeing is believing
Simply watch our movie and you'll find out how to create a great looking website in minutes, no HTML skill required!

Traditional web authoring tools are really just HTML editors, they are designed to create text layouts, providing few graphical capabilities. And yet it's evident that the vast majority of modern websites are of a graphical nature. We believe you should have complete freedom to include anything - text, graphics, photos - anywhere on the page, using just one tool. And you shouldn't need to know, or even see, the HTML that goes into creating your site, any more than a car driver needs to know how an engine works.

There's no easier solution
The Web Designer approach is simple: Pick your design from the templates; customize it with complete freedom; publish. Absolutely no HTML or Javascript skills are required!
Templates include individual web graphics, complete pages and even pre-built multi-page sites.

A one tool solution
You only need one program for creating graphical websites - from design to publishing - and that's Web Designer.
Web Designer includes customizable web graphic, webpage and website template designs plus tools for creating your own vector graphics, for photo editing (an integrated ultra-fast, non-destructive photo tool), and for advanced text layout. The Designs Gallery also includes a collection of Widgets. Site upload is covered too and there's even a free web hosting offer!

Total design freedom
Web Designer gives you total design freedom - using drag and drop you can literally place anything, anywhere on the page. And things which are normally difficult to achieve in HTML are a snap in Web Designer - for example text with curved edges, text or graphics at an angle, text flowing around objects - no problem!

WYSIWYG
Whether you customize one of the bundled templates or create your own graphics or animations, it's genuinely WYSIWYG - what you see in Web Designer is exactly what you get on your website.

Quality results guaranteed
Web Designer's templates are created by top professional designers, so the quality is guaranteed. But of course you can customize the color, text, images, size etc to create your own personal look without any loss of quality. It's the best of both worlds!

Clever stuff
But we have some clever tricks too, to make things easier for you - here's just a few of the things that will save you time and trouble: Liquid text flow around objects; easy mouseover, thumbnail and pop-up creation; automatic adjustment of photos to the correct web resolution; one-click change of site wide theme colors and shades; automatic color matching of imported objects such as buttons; a concept of 'repeating objects' such as headings and button bars - edit one instance and they all update; and buttons and text panels that automatically stretch as you change the text.

Compatibility
Working with industry standards is vital, so Web Designer sites are W3C compliant, cross browser compatible (IE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and XHTML, CSS standards based. It can also import a huge range of files types for vector graphics, image and text including PDF, RTF, RAW, PSD, TIFF and of course JPEG, PNG, GIF.

Create Websites

Choose a design
Pick your page design from the bundled templates, all created by professional designers so that quality is guaranteed. There are pre-built , ready linked multi-page sites, or you can build your own from the page layouts offered in co-ordinated theme sets. Add additional pages by simply duplicating the current one or dropping another layout from the Designs Gallery - made even easier by an auto color-matching feature that allows you to match newly added pages to existing ones. Then you can customize the pages with complete freedom and absolutely zero loss of quality.

Customize as required
Use simple drag and drop to position things on the page as you wish; enter your text (spell checker included); drag and drop any new items such as text panels, headings or extra buttons from the templates in the Designs Gallery or import your own or create new images with the drawing tools; set up links on your NavBars and menus; drag and drop your own photos (photo editor included if you need to crop or adjust brightness, contrast etc); customize colors with the simple one-click theme color editing. For extra impact, adding mouseover effects, thumbnails and pop-ups is simple.

Add widgets to your site
And it's a snap to add widgets to your site, such as Google Maps, Picasa photo albums and slideshows, YouTube movies, forms, news feeds and many, many more...

What's more the Designs Gallery includes a collection of popular widgets that can be just dragged onto the page you're working on.  Note:  Premium has a larger selection of widgets including the new 'eye catcher' animated text and photo widgets, and e-commerce widgets such as Paypal.

Publish
Check your design in the browser preview and then simply enter your FTP details and click Publish. And if you don't already have a web host, you can take advantage of the completely free web hosting offer included with Web Designer from MAGIX. We told you it was easy!

Create Web Graphics

Use professional templates
Web Designer also includes template designs for individual graphics, from buttons, NavBars and headings to text boxes and speech bubbles! Again they are all created by professional designers and can be customized to fit your site in seconds. These individual graphics can be exported in the standard web formats such as GIF, JPEG, PNG for use on existing websites, or they can be added to any page being created in Web Designer.

Or create custom graphics
If you don't find a template to fit the bill, no problem, Web Designer includes comprehensive, intuitive and powerful drawing tools from our award winning illustration software Xara Designer. So you can create your own graphics from scratch and either add them to the page being created in Web Designer or export them as JPEG, PNGs or GIFs.

Rapid Website Prototyping

Fast prototypes for designers
For designers, Web Designer offers unparalleled design freedom. It's perhaps the fastest website prototyping tool around, even for websites created from scratch. As a designer you don't need to know anything about HTML, but you'll have complete freedom to design websites as simple or as complex as you need, with an actual working HTML result, rather than just a 'fake' static mock-up.

Design without compromise
You don't need to compromise your design just because this is a webpage. Web Designer supports transparency, even grad transparency (for graphics, photos and text); it has full, automatic alpha channel support for things like soft shadows, anti-aliasing and semi-transparent objects; and if you include things not supported by HTML (let's say rotated text) it automatically converts them to optimized web graphics.

Web Designer Premium

Flash & GIF animation
Web Designer Premium is one of the easiest tools for creating truly efficient Flash animations, which you can export as .swf or add to any page being created in Web Designer.

New: Extra Widgets
Web Designer Premium includes a larger selection of Widgets in the Designs Gallery, including the new slick photo and text animation 'eye catcher' Widgets that can help give your website an edge, making them more interesting and dynamic. Plus Premium includes a selection of e-commerce Widgets and a neat 'embed a website' Widget - perfect for embedding blogs, microsites and other sites within your page.

New: Website and remote presentations
With Web Designer Premium you can easily create web-based 'slide-show' style presentations, that your website visitors can step through using the keyboard arrow keys. Plus you can apply animated transition effects as each step and page is displayed. You can also easily remotely host a web meeting (a 'Webinar') to showcase your presentation, step by step and page by page, to a group of invited participants.

New: animated page and layer transition effects
Web Designer Premium makes it easy to add a wide range of animated effects to the layers and page links in your website. You can add animated transitions to any page link or pop-up layer in your web pages.

Advanced graphics tools
Web Designer includes many customizable graphic templates of course, and a good set of basic drawing tools, but Premium includes a range of additional graphic creation tools for those who wish to create their own graphics from scratch. These include freehand and quickshape drawing tools, bevel, mould and 3D extrude. Plus additional photo features such as content aware scaling and zooming, and masking.

What's New

Web Authoring / Web Publishing

New: Widgets
Make your websites eye-catching and dynamic with our smart new 'eye catcher' widgets that enable you to add an advanced selection of slick photo and text animations to your web pages without the need for coding knowledge. More widgets will be automatically downloaded and added to your gallery over time.

Presentation websites
Create web-based 'slide-show' style presentations that your website visitors can step through using the keyboard arrow keys. Apply animated transition effects as each step and page is displayed. You can also easily remotely host a web meeting (a 'Webinar') to showcase your presentation, step by step and page by page, to a group of invited participants.

New animated transition effects for layers and page links
Web Designer makes it easy to add a wide range of animated effects to the layers and page links in your website. You can add animated transitions to any page link or pop-up layer in your web pages.

Intelligent repeating headers / footers / watermarks
Web Designer now automatically updates all occurrences of a repeating object when you edit it, so you don't have to manually update when you make a change. When one instance of a repeating object is edited, the updates appear instantly on all other instances of that object on other pages of the document. What’s more, Web Designer is smart about positioning, so objects in the top half of the page are positioned on other pages relative to the top of the page, and objects near the bottom are positioned relative to the bottom of the page, irrespective of page sizes.

Create your own distinctive 'favicons'
Web Designer now supports the addition of favicons, allowing you to customize the tabs of your web pages by displaying a custom graphic, such as a logo, on the document browser tab.

Sitemap support
You can now automatically generate a sitemap to assist search engines crawling your site.

Built-in preview window now includes navigation buttons
The navigation buttons in the top bar of the preview window allow you to move back or forward, just like in a web browser, and the Home button returns you to the page you started the preview on.

Preview your web page in full screen
You can now preview your web page in full screen by clicking the new View Full Screen button in Web Designer's built-in Preview window. When you next use preview, Web Designer remembers the last used mode (normal, maximized or full screen). and displays subsequent previews in the same way.

Quickly preview your pages in all the most popular web browsers
If you have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or Chrome installed, you can preview exactly how your page will appear in each of these popular web browsers with a single click.

Explore your FTP web space
You can browse and delete files and folders on your FTP server using Web Designer's built-in Web Space Explorer.

New templates
A new range of templates gives you an even greater design choice when creating your websites.

General Tools & Useability Enhancements

Brand new ‘magic snap’ for object alignment
Web Designer now provides ‘magic’ magnetic object snapping. As you drag an object, it ‘snaps’ to points and lines of interest nearby and indicates what it has snapped to by displaying dynamic snap lines and points.  This makes it easy to align objects with each other, or with guidelines or the page center or edges.

Improved page management

• A new default Page & Layer Gallery ‘pages’ mode displays a narrow list of page thumbnails – for easy page selection and access.
• Web Designer initially displays an uncluttered single page view. Use the Page & Layer Gallery to quickly move to different pages, or switch to multi-page view by right clicking on the page and selecting the multi-page view option on the menu.

Improved embedding of graphics into flowing text
Creating anchored objects is now a one-click action and objects that you anchor in text now also repel text, helping you create a wrap-around effect easily. Repel margins can also now be defined separately for the margin width and height. Also anchored objects can be constrained to move vertically only, which is very useful where you have objects to the right or left of the text that need to move only up and down.

Advanced graphics tools
Web Designer includes many customizable graphic templates of course, and a good set of basic drawing tools, but Premium 7 now includes a range of additional graphic creation tools for those who wish to create their own graphics from scratch. These include freehand and quickshape drawing tools, bevel, mould and 3D extrude. Plus additional photo features such as content aware scaling and zooming and masking.

A new straight line / arrowhead tool
This provides a really simple way to draw single-segment straight lines and a new way to control the arrow head and tail on any line.

New paste operations
New paste operations bring much more flexibility to pasting operations, allowing Paste position, Paste size, Paste replacing selection, Paste in current layer and Paste in place in current layer.

Export animation documents as AVI files
Web Designer now allows you to export any animation or non-animation document as an AVI file, helping you create your own web-ready movie content.

Tabbed document windows
Tabs at the top of the Web Designer window show clearly which document you are currently viewing, the document type and whether there are unsaved changes. See at a glance which documents you have currently open and gain access to them by just clicking on the document tab.

Fly-out galleries for instant viewing and flexible docking
A new gallery bar gives instant access to all galleries, which now fly out as you hover the mouse pointer over a new gallery bar. It's easy to move galleries around the workspace, and you can pin and dock them wherever you want, either individually or in groups or 'stacks' on top of each other.

Quick alignment of selected objects
Quick alignment of selected objects is made possible by the new right click menu option 'Align'. This enables you to directly align multiple objects horizontally and vertically, without having to open the alignment dialog.

Solid, live shape drawing
When creating new shapes such as rectangles, ellipses and quickshapes you'll now see a solid filled shape as you drag across the page (instead of an outline). It's far more WYSIWYG, you'll see the correct fill and line color as you drag. This works even if you have a fat line.

Easier control of graphic styles (attribute rules).
There is a major change in the way that attributes (the appearance or 'style' of an object) are applied to a newly drawn object or line. Now a new object can take on the style of the last selected object, rather than the last drawn. It sounds like a small change, but is more intuitive and more powerful - for example you can copy the style of any object by just selecting it then drawing a new object.

HTML 5 video
MP4 movie files added to your website will now play without Flash installed if the browser supports HTML5 video, so movies play on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

Hierachical Designs Gallery
A hierarchical arrangement of the Designs Gallery makes it far easier to find the template you're looking for at a glance.

Other Minor Enhancements

Greater control over clipping objects to page
A new option in the Website tab of the Website Properties dialog allows you to choose whether or not to clip objects to web page edges. If you do not clip, then any objects overlapping your page on to the pasteboard will be displayed in full, rather than cropped to the page border. In addition, any animated transitions you apply will now start from the browser window edge rather than the page border.

Clearer InfoBar text rendering
Clearer Infobar text rendering brings greater screen display quality and clarity to all Web Designer toolbars, if ClearType text is enabled in your Windows' control panel.

New Photo Optimize dialog control
The Optimize Photo dialog now includes the option to maintain the photo’s current resolution.

Text repelling within layers
You can now prevent objects on the current layer from repelling text on other layers using the new "Text repelling within layer" option in the Layer Properties dialog. This option also stops text on the current layer being repelled by objects on higher layers. This is useful for (and is set by default on) popup layers in web documents.

Improved context sensitive menus
Improved context sensitive menus offer direct access to useful actions. Right-click on objects, page or pasteboard for instant access to many useful operations relevant to the object.

Add your website to Xara/MAGIX user galleries
When you publish your website, you can now choose to submit your site for possible inclusion in the User Galleries hosted by Xara/MAGIX.

Easily add header code to a page or website
Web Designer now allows you to enter HTML code into the head of your web pages, as well as the body, giving you greater versatility to customize your website. You can easily add your own code (or code from a widget provider) into individual pages or all pages in your website. Also code entry for either the head or body is easier with a new larger pop-up code editing dialog.