Xara Web Designer MX Premium

Introduction
Using Xara Web Designer MX Premium
Pricing and Support
Conclusion

Introduction

Xara Web Designer MX Premium is a web design program that includes readymade webpage and website templates within the Designs gallery. Just pick any web design with individual web graphics, complete pages, or pre-built multi-page sites. Customize it as required. You can customize the web graphics too, or create your own vector graphics, import and edit photos, apply animated effects and animated transitions to the layers and page links on your website. In addition, you can create web-based slide-show style presentations, Flash animations, and text layouts. The Designs gallery also includes a collection of interactive chart and graph widgets, and e-commerce widgets such as one for Paypal. All these work great with no HTML or Javascript skills required.

All the sites created by Xara Web Designer MX Premium are W3C compliant, cross-browser compatible (IE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome) and XHTML, CSS standards-based.

Xara Web Designer MX Premium is from Xara, a company based in Gaddesden Place, UK. Other than Web Designer MX Premium, Xara also creates other graphic software such as Xara Designer Pro 7, Xara Picture Editor, Xara Xtreme 5 Pro, Xara 3D Maker 7, etc. You can learn more about their products and download a trial version of Xara Web Designer MX Premium from their site.

My contact for this review was Nova Fisher. Thank you, Nova.

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Using Xara Web Designer MX Premium

Download the installer, run the setup routine, and follow the instructions. When installed, follow these steps:

1. Access your Windows Start menu and choose All Programs | Xara | Xara Web Designer MX Premium. This opens the Xara Web Designer MX Premium interface with a blank document, as shown in Figure 1, below.
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   Figure 1: Xara Web Designer MX Premium interface
2. Now, access the File menu and choose the New from Designs gallery option, as shown in Figure 2, below.
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   Figure 2: New from Designs gallery option to be selected
3. This opens the Designs gallery task pane, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 3, below. Within this task pane, you can view all the web templates.
4. 
   Figure 3: Designs gallery
4. Double-click on any folder within the Designs gallery to open a sub-folder or to select the web template, as shown in Figure 4, below.
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   Figure 4: Web template selected within the Designs gallery
5. Once a web template is selected, double-click to open it. Figure 5, below, shows the selected web template opened within the Xara Web Designer MX Premium interface.
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   Figure 5: Web template opened within the Xara Web Designer MX Premium interface
7. Now, you can edit individual graphics, buttons, NavBars, headings, text boxes, speech bubbles, etc. If you don't find a template of your requirement, use the drawing tools and create your own graphics from scratch, and add them to the page being created in Web Designer.
6. When done with designing your web template, check your design in the browser preview and publish your website by accessing the File menu and choosing the Publish website option in it. If you don't have a web host, you can use the free web hosting offer included with Web Designer from MAGIX.

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Pricing and Support

Xara Web Designer MX Premium costs USD 99.99.

Support is through e-mail, an online knowledge base, and FAQs. Extensive online tutorials including demo movies are available.

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Conclusion

Xara Web Designer MX Premium is a program that someone with little or no web page design skills can use—yet it offers you more than basic capabilities. You can also use Xara Web Designer MX Premium to create online presentations that work without Flash. Thus, all these are iPad compatible too.

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