Page Design

Responsive Web Design

Does your website pass the Google mobile-friendly test? If not, you need Web Designer!

With the surge in popularity of browsing on mobiles and tablets it is becoming essential to create sites that are tailored to the needs of these visitors. Until now the solution has involved creating multiple sites and a good understanding of JavaScript. Web Designer offers a RWD solution that allows you to create a single file containing variants of your site at different widths, so that you website responds dynamically to the screen size of the viewer, presenting the design most appropriate to their device. And as you’d expect from Web Designer you won’t need to do any coding whatsoever!

Put simply you can create multiple variants - eg desktop, tablet, phone - with shared content (eg text, photos, graphics) but with the ability to freely customize the layout of the variants to suit the target device size. The layout of the variants is entirely in your control, ensuring a quality result for mobiles and tablets. Web Designer export s a single HTML file that can dynamically change from one layout to another depending on the screen size of the viewer.

Example (The Vue theme with desktop, tablet and mobile variants)

Embedded Graphics (Added August 2015)

Two changes give you much greater control over any graphics that you embed into your text.

Firstly when you insert a graphic into a text column it is now automatically resized down to column width.

Secondly you can control whether it's embedded inline in your text or whether text should flow to the left or right of your embedded graphic.

Choose whether a graphic is embedded inline, or whether text should flow to the left or right

Text Handling Improvements

Auto-creation of links when you type a URL so for example typing www.xara.com will automatically create a link to the Xara site
A text background color option so you can easily highlight words
An easy way to replace one font with another throughout a document (especially useful for replacing missing fonts in imported PDFs)
Update style to match (useful for copying styles from another document or applying styles to unstyled documents, particularly imported PDFs)
More detailed information on font embedding permissions in Document Information
Accurate export of text with manual kerns
Update of the Font Awesome Symbols (a quick & easy way to insert symbols from the large and growing Font Awesome selection. The full set is displayed via the Insert menu)
Fonts will look correct in exported documents where fonts are missing if outlines are embedded (for example from imported PDFs, most of which include embedded character outlines).

New Mouseover Effects

By default the mouseover now fades in, but if you want something more eye-catching you can now choose from 18 different effects including bounce, wobble and flash, and you can set the speed.

Some of the new animation styles that can now be triggered by click (or tap), mouseover or 'on reveal'

Online Editing

Document Sync With Dropbox or GDrive

Web Designer can now sync files via Dropbox and Google Drive. So if you have the same file open on multiple computers, and you make an edit and save the file on one computer, it will be updated in Web Designer on the other computers.

And there's another bonus: Dropbox and Google Drive maintain older versions of your files, and provide easy ways of viewing and reverting back to earlier versions (in Dropbox simply right click on a file and select 'View previous versions'). This is a safe, easy and storage-saving way of maintaining multiple versions of your website files.

Easily sync your documents via Dropbox or Google Drive

Online Editing With Xara Online Designer

An ultra-simple way to view, edit and update the content of your Xara website using a web browser on any computer or tablet (yes even a Mac or Android tablet!), from anywhere in the world, and to re-publish the website.

For commercial designers:

Give controlled editing rights to your clients, namely allow them to edit text and replace images
Brainstorming a new design with your client over the phone? Now you can update the cloud version in real time so you client can see the changes as you talk

And for everyone:

Update the text (blogs, news, prices for example) or replace images and re-publish your own website from anywhere
Work with colleagues on the same website at the same time.

Find out more in the V11 Release Notes and the Xara Online Designer Intro.

Content

New Slideshow Widget

A powerful and flexible new Widget for creating slideshows. You can see another example in this demo site (the photos of the different bikes in the New Models section). You'll find the Widget in the Designs Gallery under Page Elements & Widgets > Photo Slideshows & Galleries..

An example slideshow created with the new widget from TaskPilot

New Templates

6 new General Website Themes (normally sold in Web Packs for \$10 each!) with up to 16 page layouts, all including new mobile variants, plus other designs have been updated to include mobile variants.

View previews of a selection of the themes.

6 new general web themes, all with ready-made mobile variants

Other Enhancements

Secure FTP Publishing Options

Web Designer 11 now offers support for publishing with SFTP and FTPS.

Other Minor Enhancements

Web export options dialog now usable offline
Small improvements in the drop-down menus
You can now browse objects in the Page & Layer Gallery, not just pages and layers
Improvements to Word import
A new photo text panel SmartShape
InfoBar pulses on tool selection.

PDF Import Improvements

PDF Import:

Improved text editability (improved text reconstruction, margins, better text link import, better underline import)
Better support for import of PDFs with embedded font subsets, where fonts are not installed locally
Many other minor fixes and improvements.