Xara Web Designer 9 Premium: Indezine Review

Introduction
Feature list
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

The new Xara Web Designer 9 Premium is a web design program that includes ready-made webpage and website templates. You just need to select any web design. These designs include web graphics, complete pages, and even pre-built multi-page sites. Once you make a choice, you can customize web graphics, create vector graphics, import and edit photos, apply animated effects, and animated transitions to layers and page links on your website. You can also create web-based slide-show style presentations, Flash animations, and text layouts. A Designs gallery is included. This 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 9 Premium are W3C compliant, cross-browser compatible (IE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and XHTML, CSS standards-based.

If you have already worked with Web Designer MX Premium (or earlier), then you'll find plenty of new features in this version. In this review, we'll explore these new features.

Xara Web Designer 9 Premium is from Xara, a company based in Gaddesden Place, UK. Other than Web Designer MX Premium, Xara also creates other graphic software such as 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 9 Premium from their site.

My contact for this review was Nova Fisher. Thank you, Nova.

Back

Feature List

Download the installer, run the setup routine, and follow instructions. When launched, you will see the Xara Web Designer 9 Premium interface, as shown in Figure 1, below.

Figure 1: The Xara Web Designer 9 Premium interface

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

Xara Web Designer 9 Premium has some major upgrade that introduces new features and content and improved usability. Following are the key new features:

1. 20 new general web theme templates and a new category of business specific web themes (1 included free).
2. Improved HTML5 & CSS3 support.
3. Now there is a direct integration of 600+ Google Web Fonts.
4. The new Xara Web Designer 9 Premium is now Retina® screen compatible.
5. Web page background handling options are now improved and also some new features added.
6. Extension of the automatic object positioning and page resizing feature, with Smart Pull.
7. MAGIX Online World ‘M’ hosting included free including free domain and easy publishing.
8. New widgets including basic tables, Google+, AdSense, new interactive photo sliders / galleries.
9. Easy drag and drop NavBar replacement.
10. 64 bit Windows support.
11. Easy addition of Google Analytics.

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

Back

Pricing and Support

Xara Web Designer 9 Premium costs USD 99.99.

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

Back

Conclusion

Xara Web Designer 9 Premium is a capable product that creates cool web pages. In fact, it does much more and also lets you create PowerPoint-style web presentations from scratch. The web output created is clean HTML and CSS. So, this can be further edited in any standard web editor. So why would you use Xara Web Designer 9 Premium rather than another program such as Adobe Dreamweaver? The answer is that the former provides far too many options that allow you to create content rich pages with amazing visual fidelity, such as online slides—thus Web Designer 9 Premium is a very capable program that can be an integral part of your web design software collection.

Back