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!