Xara Web Designer bills itself as "Web design for the rest of us." It’s a graphically oriented Web-authoring tool that is supposed to make it easier to create a Web site without delving into a bunch of HTML code. Instead of creating graphics in a separate program and integrating them into an HTML editing tool like Dreamweaver, you use just one tool for both the graphics and the layout of your site: Xara Web Designer.
I confess that I’ve been developing Web sites the traditional way with Dreamweaver for a long time, so evaluating Xara is a bit difficult for me. I’m also a bit of an HTML snob, so I’ll tell you right off the bat that if you want any "Web guy" to maintain your site later, you’ll have to forget about it. The HTML code Xara generates is confusing at best, so if you create a site in Xara Web Designer, you need to use Xara to update it later. Your Web site won’t be search engine optimized and you’ll have to stick to creating fixed-width sites.
With all of these caveats out of the way, realistically a lot of people just want a Web site. If you’re a graphically oriented person who wants a simple site for personal use, Xara Web Designer might be just the tool for you. You don’t have to worry about setting up HTML tables or learning Cascading Style Sheets to place items on a page. As in a drawing program like Adobe Illustrator, anything can be placed anywhere on the Web page.
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to see if I can recreate a site for one of my books that I’ve already created in Dreamweaver. The live site is at http://www.FundstotheRescue.com. As you can see in the screen captures, the site I created with Xara is considerably different. The reason I’m using an existing site is that most people will be pulling in graphics from elsewhere. Whether it’s photos of the kids for a personal site, or a product site like this one, inevitably, you won’t create all the graphics within Xara Web Designer. You need to follow these seven steps to create a Web site.
1. Decide whether you want to start with a template or a blank page.
Xara Web Designer comes with many built-in templates that can work as a starting point for your Web site. Just as a word processor template can make it easier and faster to create a document, a Web template figures out colors and designs for you. In the Designs gallery, you can double-click a name to see thumbnails of the themes.
2. Gather any external graphics.
In my case, I had the book cover and several other graphics that I wanted to include in the Web site. Xara Web designer can import a range of graphics, including EPS, PDF, PSD, TIF, GIF, JPG, and PNG. It automatically optimizes the photos and graphics, so you don’t need to worry about resizing your images in separate programs.
3. Play with Theme Colors.
It’s easy to change the colors in the template. If you change the named colors you can quickly change the look of one of the templates. For example, I changed the blues to greens in the Serenity template, since my book cover has greens in it.
4. Edit Text
Use the text tool to edit text. It works much like a word processor. You can format the text using the options on the toolbar. Highlight the text, and then change the font, size, and other attributes.
5. Add Images.
The easiest way to add images is to drag them from Windows Explorer to the Xara window.
6. Wrap Text Around Images.
To make the text wrap around the image, you need to right click the image and choose Repel text under. In the Text repelling properties dialog box, type in a margin.
7. Preview and Publish
When you are finished with your site, you can preview what it will look like in a Web browser by choosing File|Preview web site. In the browser preview, you can check how links and hover attributes will work on the live site. When you’re ready to upload it, you choose File|Publish web site to automatically FTP it to your Web server.
Xara Web Designer is an easy-to-use tool for people who have no interest in learning any HTML. Given the limitations of the software, I’d be reluctant to create anything but a small site with it. But with that said Xara can, as the company claims, be used as a prototyping tool. It’s a lot easier to use than Photoshop, so it may be a way to cut down the time it takes to create new site designs.