Review of Xara Web Designer MX Premium

Bottom Line

Xara Web Designer and its more feature filled sibling Web Designer Premium are great no-code editors for people who want to get started building websites but don’t want or need to learn the programming of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. There are dozens of templates included and lots of ways to modify images, adjust your graphics, and change the look of your pages.

Pros

• Like all no-code editors, Web Designer is very easy to use and requires no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to create a dynamic website.
• Web Designer MX includes robust image editing right in the software so there is no need to purchase both a web page editor and a graphics editor. Optimization features help you make sure the images are small so that your pages load quickly.
• Web Designer creates standards-compliant web pages that work across web browsers. You can also test with any desktop browser you have installed right inside Web Designer.
• There is support for HTML5 video as well as embedding YouTube videos and other widgets.
• Dozens of themes that are both beautiful on their own and easily customizable to make them your own. Plus more are being added to Xara all the time.
• Web Designer Premium also offers the ability to create remote presentations as well as websites.

Cons

• While the code is standards-compliant, it is still very ugly. Web Designer does not generate HTML that you would want to open in another editor to edit by hand. Nearly everything is added as blocks of text or images surrounded by the SPAN element. There is some use of headlines (H1, H2, etc.) but in general everything is placed on the page with a SPAN indicating the styles.
• There is some mobile support, such as for mouseover effects that don’t exist on mobile devices, but I couldn’t find any support for creating and testing full mobile versions of a site.
• The only link checking I could find was in pop-up windows to allow me to check links manually. There was no automated check.
• While both Web Designer and Web Designer Premium offered FTP connectivity, only Premium provided a way to browse the files on the server. And neither provided any secure access such as FTPs, secure FTP, or SSH.
• Web Designer does not provide a way to build tables right inside the editor. You can either build a table in Excel and then import it into Web Designer or create a table using graphical elements. While this can get you the look and feel of a table, you lose the semantic meanings that the TABLE, TD, and TH elements provide.
• While there is some HTML5 support (mostly for video) in Web Designer, I could not find any way to change the default doctype (XHTML 1.0 Transitional) to HTML5 or to add in HTML5 elements like sectioning elements or semantic elements.

My Review of Web Designer MX Premium

Web Designer is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to put up a good looking, profeessional website without needing to learn HTML or hire a designer. The graphics editor tools inside Web Designer are worth the price all by themselves beause you can do so many things with your images. I was very impressed with how easy it was to create and manage a fancy design with little or no knowledge of any of the background programming.

This makes Web Designer ideal for small business owners who want to maintain their own website but don’t have time to learn HTML or the money to hire a professional designer. It is fully WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and the introductory pages walk you through everything from modifying text to adding videos and maps to your pages.

The real fun with Web Designer is the widgets. You can add all sorts of things to your web pages quickly and easily. This version adds the ability to add charts with DHTML and SVG graphics to make them interactive. Other useful widgets include a new QR code widget, favicon creator (Premium only), photo slider, and more.

While Web Designer might be annoying for people who want to learn HTML or CSS or for web designers who are used to having more control over their code, it is a fun tool for newcomers to use and it has enough professional featuers that small businesses won’t suffer at all either.

This product was reviewed using an NFR copy supplied by the publisher and information on their website. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.