Xara Web Designer 6

I found Xara Web designer to be fun to use. It has a lot of built-in features that newcomers to Web design will love as well as some support for more professional needs, so it's useful to small business owners as well. Web designer is not a tool for someone who wants to get down and dirty in the design of the page. It's possible to design quite intricate pages with it, but it's most efficient use is for people who want a website up quickly that looks great.

I spent several hours just playing with the dozens of different templates that Xara Web Designer offers, and I could easily see using this for a small business site. You just choose the design you like, drag your images to replace the placeholders, and paste in your text. If you've already got the images and text, you can have your website up and running in an hour or so.

Ironically, one of the problems I had at first was caused because I was over thinking the software. I couldn't find a way to import images - there was no "button". But who needs a button when you can simply open a file manager window, browse to the image you want, and drag it onto your site. Once it's there, Web Designer will offer to optimize it for you (if it's extremely large), allow you to resize and crop it, and move it to the exact location you want it in. You can even set up a thumbnail that will automatically open to the larger image when clicked.

Some of the features I found most interesting were:

• There were literally dozens of templates I could choose from in the designs gallery. As I said above, I spent a lot of time just playing with those.
• A "bitmap gallery" shows you all the images on your site
• It was easy (see below)^* to add images, turn them into thumbnails and then create a pop-up gallery of photos.
• If you use Xara templates, a "Made with Xara" link is added to the bottom. This isn't interesting. What is interesting is that you become an affiliate partner of Xara and can send any earnings you make to charity if you so choose (or keep it yourself)

But there were some frustrations as well:

• I tested the thumbnail popup with one image and it worked great. But then after I added 3 more and exported the file as HTML, Internet Explorer gave me a JavaScript error for each image.
• I couldn't put a shadow on my image using the drop-shadow button. I had to put a box behind the image, and then put a drop shadow on that.
• The menus change every time you go to a different tool, which was very distracting. I think ultimately I would get used to this, as it's a common feature in software. But just starting out I would lose my place and think "wasn't I able to do Y?" and not be able to find the button.

Overall, I think Xara Web Designer is a great WSYIWYG editor for people who don't want to delve too much into programming or extremely dynamic Web design. Most professional Web designers won't find this software useful, but hobbyists and small business owners will like it a lot.

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.