Xara Web Designer 10 Premium: Indezine Review

Introduction

Xara Web Designer 10 Premium is an easy template based solution that gives you total page design freedom, with no HTML or coding skills required. It comes in 2 versions: Web Designer and Web Designer Premium. Web Designer Premium offers advanced web design features over and above the features available within Web Designer. Xara Web Designer 10 Premium is the newest version -- in comparison to the Web Designer 9 (or earlier) you'll find plenty of new features and content in Web Designer 10.

With Xara Web Designer 10 Premium, you just need to select any web design from the Designs gallery which includes web graphics, complete pages, and even pre-built multi-page sites. Once the choice is made, customize the web graphics, import and edit photos, create vector graphics, apply animated effects and animated transitions to layers and page links in your website. Additionally, create web-based slide-show style presentations, Flash animations, and text layouts.

Also the Designs gallery contains a collection of interactive chart and graph widgets, and e-commerce widgets such as one for PayPal. All these work great with no HTML or Javascript skills required. The sites created using Xara Web Designer 10 Premium are W3C compliant, cross browser compatible (IE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and XHTML, CSS standards based. Moreover you can add page titles, descriptions and keywords for SEO, add page tracking (e.g. Google analytic, and auto created sitemaps for search engines.

Xara Web Designer 10 Premium is from Xara, a company based in Gaddesden Place, UK. Other than Xara Web Designer 10 Premium, Xara also creates other graphic software such as Xara Web Designer 9 Premium, Xara Designer Pro 7, Xara Picture Editor, Xara Xtreme 5 Pro, Xara 3D Maker 7, etc. You can learn more about their products and download a trial version of Xara Web Designer 10 Premium from their site.

My contact for this review was Nova Fisher -- thank you Nova.

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Feature List

Download the installer, run the setup routine and follow the instructions. When launched, you will see the Xara Web Designer 10 Premium interface, as shown in Figure 1, below.


Figure 1: The Xara Web Designer 10 Premium interface

In this review we'll explore the new feature list -- the working process of the application is same as of the previous Web Designer MX Premium product.

Xara Web Designer 10 Premium has some major upgrade that introduces new features and content and improved usability. Following are the key new features:

1. Responsive website design (Premium)
2. Xara Supersites (Premium)
3. New page transitions
4. Scale to fit
5. Online content catalog
6. SmartShapes
7. A new top level Insert menu
8. New Accordian Z Slideshow Widgets (Premium)
9. New social media widgets
10. Password protected MAGIX online world pages
11. MAGIX online world 'M' hosting included free
12. 10 new general web themes in Web Designer 10 Premium (there are 5 in Web Designer 10) .

There are some other minor enhancements:

1. Auto-rotate of photos on import
2. Improved Microsoft Word and PDF import
3. Creating online presentations

Once you are done creating your site, you can quickly export it as a web page or multiple pages -- the output is clean HTML and CSS and can be viewed thereafter in any web browser (see Figure 2, below).


Figure 2: Exported web page

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Pricing and Support

Xara Web Designer 10 Premium costs USD 99.99.

Support is through e-mail, an online knowledge base and FAQs. Extensive online tutorials including demo movies are available.

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Conclusion

At this price point, Xara Web Designer 10 Premium is no less than a steal. Even if you use another product to create web pages, you still will find some use for this amazing product.

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