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!
