What's new in Xara Web Designer 6
Significantly enhanced NavBar handling and DHTML menu support
- A new NavBar 'object' which can be dragged around as a single graphic
- Take any button design and quickly turn it into a horizontal or vertical NavBar
- Intelligent automatic button stretching so as you edit the button text and the button width will adjust.
- Option to have all buttons the same width or each to be as wide as the text label
- Ability to create an automatic NavBar with buttons linked to all pages of your website. The NavBar is updated as you add / remove pages
- Auto-highlighting of 'current page' NavBar buttons
- Support for DHTML sub-menus with various animation and transparency effects
Drag 'n' drop color schemes for instant color changes
Instead of editing each individual named Theme Color, you can now instantly alter the whole color scheme of your website by simply dropping the color swatches in the Designs Gallery onto your page. Every theme has a collection of ready-made color schemes, plus you can easily add new ones of your own.
Drag n drop Widgets from the Designs Gallery, and a new Widget library
New sections in the Designs Gallery provide a wide range of widgets which can be drag and dropped onto your website. The Widgets provide interactive website add-ons ranging from movie players, to e-commerce features (e.g. a Buy button to sell goods or services from your website) Forms, Maps and lots more.
HTML snippets can be pasted directly into your document, with an automatic preview/placeholder created
Many website add-ons and widgets provide a snippet of HTML to embed into your page. Web Designer can now accept just pasting this snippet. What's more, it detects this is an HTML snippet and automatically creates a placeholder on the page, with a static preview of the snippet. Now it couldn't be easier to add snippets to your page, and you can position them anywhere on your web page.
An easy way to add links to (and upload) external files such as PDF, Flash and Word files
You can link to external files using a new option in the Link dialog. Selecting a file such as a Word document will attach the file and upload it to your website. Clicking the link on the website will let your visitor download (or open) the file. You can also drag & drop .PDF and .SWF (flash) files onto the page which will also attach the file to the website for upload next time you Publish. In the case of Flash (.swf) files these are embedded into the page and a static preview is automatically created. This can be resized on the page. In the case of PDF files a PDF icon is added to the page, and the PDF file uploaded to your website which if clicked will open the PDF file in the web browser.
Incremental Publishing
When you publish your website Web Designer now uploads only the files changed since the last publish operation. This provides a huge performance gain when editing large websites, particularly if you have large attachments such as video files.
FTP details can be stored with the document
The Publish Properties dialog now offers the ability to save the FTP details with the document. This is great if you have multiple websites published to different server locations or under different domains. In addition you can choose to save the FTP password with the file (to be used with caution!).
Named FTP profiles
You can save the your FTP settings into a named profile, especially useful if you manage multiple websites under different domains. The Profile list can contain third party profiles, such as Magix free web hosting. ?
Free web hosting offer
Web Designer now comes with a free website hosting offer from MAGIX, so you can publish your website as part of Magix-Online world.? The offer includes 500MB of storage and your own web address.
Totally re-designed application appearance
There's an all-new look to Web Designer, including modern skin and icons.
New fly-out tools and buttons
Fly-out tools and buttons present a simpler user interface, but with direct one-click access to a wider range of common functions. Many buttons now have a fly-out menus with related options. These buttons have been carefully designed so that you can still get to the main function with a single click of the button, but also very quickly access any of the additional options without any extra clicks.?
A large selection of new designs in the Designs Gallery
Many of the existing designs have been updated plus there's a large collection of completely new designs, both themes and individual web graphics including new NavBar and 'graphics' folders.
New 'complete website' designs
Every theme now includes a ready-made fully linked up 8-page website, so you can quickly and easily create whole sites.
Enhanced photo thumbnail pop-ups
The animated photo pop-up effects (where clicking on a photo thumbnail pops-up a larger version) have been improved to provide higher quality animation effects, an optional soft shadow, title and captions and page dimming (the page under the pop-up can be dimmed).
Create a slideshow and Next / Previous on a gallery or any number of thumbnails
If you have a number of thumbnail photos with the pop-up effect on the page, you can now show this as a slideshow, with Next / Previous / Play / Pause controls and an optional thumbnail strip shown at the bottom of the window.
Auto filling of the photo-gallery via simple drag 'n' drop
If you drag and drop a selection of image files onto a page of thumbnails, such as any photo gallery design from the templates (each Theme has one 'photo gallery' layout), it will automatically populate the gallery.
Automatic photo-optimize feature
When you import a photo Web Designer offers to reduce the resolution for you, which can save a lot of memory and disc space (most digital camera files are far higher resolution that you'd ever want to use on a web page). And in addition when you publish a site, Web Designer automatically reduces the resolution of all images to be no more than the size they appear on your website. ?
Now there's also a new menu option 'Optimize all JPEGs' which will go through your document and reduce the size of all photo files to be no more than the size on the page. It all means smaller file sizes, faster pages, happier visitors!
Enhanced Text tool
The Text tool has been improved to include bullets, numbered lists and indents.
Anchored' graphics (so photos and graphics flow with the text)
In the Text tool there's a new option to embed a graphic into the flowing text story as an anchored object. You can still drag the graphic wherever you like, but it will then remain tied to the anchor point in the text.
Support for justified text
We've added support for fully justified text, and this even works with text flow-around features.
Easy MP4 video upload and built-in video player
Drag 'n' drop an MP4 video file onto the page, and it embeds a Flash video player to play the file, and automatically uploads the video file to your web-server!
Enhanced page color and background color support
By default the website background color takes on the color of your page. The default is white, but you can change this by simply dragging any other color onto the page. But also if you drag a color onto the pasteboard area (the grey area surrounding the page) you can now create a different colored page surround, giving a more WYSIWYG result.
Ability to support rounded-corner pages, add drop shadows to the page and set the vertical offset
If you enable page coloring (by dragging a color onto the pasteboard), then in the Page & Layer gallery a new Page Background layer is enabled, locked by default. If you unlock this layer you can adjust the page rectangle's soft shadow using the shadow tool, and also make it a rounded rectangle (using the rectangle Tool). This enables very easy rounded rectangle page backgrounds.
Improved Page & Layer Gallery, with a new 'Solo' mode
The new Page & Layer Gallery provides a quick way to view and re-arrange pages and layers on each page, for example offering drag & drop re-ordering of pages. There's also a new 'Solo' mode which allows a specific layer to be viewed and worked on in isolation.
New time-saving 'Preview current page'and 'Preview whole document' options
The Preview icon on the top bar is a new style fly-out with 2 options; Preview current page, and preview whole website.
Auto-updating Designs Gallery
The Designs Gallery includes new 'download' sections and content, that can be updated remotely by Xara.
Advanced: Simpler HTML and 'pure HTML' paragraphs
There are improvements to the quality of HTML including better use of CSS. Plus for advanced users who want 'pure HTML blocks' you can now override the individual line positioning and force each paragraph of text to be output as a single unbroken HTML
block of text.
Automatic backup of all open documents
A new set of controls in the Options dialog provides an automatic backup facility where the program can regularly save copies of all open documents. You can set the folder where these backups are saved, and how often the backup occurs.? ]
Automatic save and restore of open documents on application closedown
You can now just close Web Designer (or shut down your computer) and Web Designer saves all open documents and restores them the next time you start the program. ?
