Can you say "innovation"? The folks at Xara Software invented the
word! From the first time I saw their 3D rendering tools about 10 years ago, I
was hooked on their products. They are cheap. They are powerful. And they are
easy to use. What more could you ask for? How about the world's cheapest and
most powerful web design tool? Check out Xara
Web Designer.
Xara
Web Designer loads fast and it's built-in tips and video tutorials
step you through the process of selecting a template from their gallery,
customizing it, and gradually building out your own web site. The templates
are very well-designed and sharp, and they will make your sites look like a
million dollars. No tacky clip art here.
You can change the hues and colors of any of the Xara
Web Designer elements ranging from the graphical header at the top of
the page, to the navigation buttons to text boxes. Virtually anything can be
modified with a click or a slide of a button. And once you make the change to
one page, you can have those changes automatically applied to the rest of the
web site.
One of the features I really like in Xara
Web Designer is what they called "liquid text" -- the
ability to drag and drop a graphical element such as a photo through a
paragraph and watch as the text wraps itself around the photo like water. This
feature is so cool, you just want to drag graphics through text all day. And
it's the only web design tool that offers flow-around text control.
If you want to change stock photos included in a template, just drag and
drop your own photo on top of it, and it magically replaces and resizes itself
to fit the template. Navigation buttons will expand as you enter text into
them.
Xara
Web Designer has many other tricks up its sleeve including great
controls for photo galleries and text pop-ups. I particularly like the way you
can easily stretch text panels to accommodate your text. It also includes some
great drawing tool from Xara Xtreme so you can create your own custom graphics
from right within Xara
Web Designer.
This is a great tool for experienced graphic designers and web developers.
Instead of working in PhotoShop to produce mock-ups of web pages, you can use Xara
Web Designer to create working web sites. Same powerful graphical
development tools including shadows, alpha channels, and much more. You will
be very, very surprised by the functionality and power of this inexpensive
tool.
Now I know that products such as XSite
have taken the Internet by storm. Anyone who has ever wanted to build a web
site without needing to know anything about HTML has probably already
purchased XSite. And for good
reason. It is an extremely powerful tool, but it's also $197.00 which ain't
chump change.
In comparison, Xara
Web Designer is also very powerful, has some very unusual and
compelling features, it is extremely easy to use and it's only $49.99. That's
right -- it's under $50 and you can even download a free trial. That's pretty
amazing considering the quality of the tool. You have to see their little
movie on their web site to truly appreciate its magic. Click here
to see the movie now. And get some Kleenex while you're at it because you will
be drooling after you watch the movie!
Xara Web Designer
