Xara Web Designer Premium 9 is a template-based design tool which makes it quick and easy to create quality websites.
Browse the program's Designs Gallery, for instance, and you'll find 60 professionally-produced multipage web designs, each of which has several colour schemes available. You can only work with one template in the trial version, but previews of the rest will give you a good idea of their contents. And if you open the example template, and replace its default text and images with your own, then you'll have a fully working website: it really can be as easy as that.
Reopen the Designs Gallery, though, and you'll find plenty of other ways to enhance your site. Like buttons, navigation bars, photos, icons, and a huge clipart collection - just drag and drop an item onto the page and customise it to suit your needs.
If you'd like to add some interactivity to your site then you'll appreciate the program's widgets. You can embed YouTube videos on your pages, Facebook or Twitter buttons, photo slideshows, media players, contact forms, PayPal buttons, news headlines, QR codes and more. So whether you're looking to display your latest holiday photos, or an interactive analysis of your business's last year's sales figures, there's something for you here.
And as this is the "Premium" version of the program, it includes plenty of professional features which you won't get in the standard editions. New additions include an integrated Google Web Font picker, for instance, Retina screen compatibility, and Google Analytics support. There are tools to create presentations, animations (Flash and GIF) and sitemaps. You get many more photo options, including the ability to manipulate your photos with Photoshop plugins (there are 40 to get you started). And there's a screen capture tool, HTML 5 video support, more import and export options, more themes and content in general, and even your choice of top level domain name, free for a year, which you can use with the program's free hosting to get your site online.
Note that there is now a separate 64-bit Premium edition.
Xara Web Designer 9.0.1 brings these changes:
- Export of shadowed photos and photo popups improved
- Chrome Favicon problem worked around
- Photo optimisation fixes
- SVG export fixed in 64 bit Web Designer Premium
- Color editor/replacement fixes
- Transparent parts of widgets now handled properly by text repelling and click detection
- Other fixes and small improvements
- Help updates
