Xara Web Designer is a template-based design tool which makes it quick and easy to create quality websites.
The program comes with a host of professionally-produced multipage responsive web designs (only a few are editable in the trial, though). These can immediately be enhanced with your preferred buttons, headings, navigation bars, photos, icons, movies, MP3s, PDFs and more. Just drag and drop an item onto your page and customise it to suit your needs.
If you'd like to add some interactivity to your site, you'll appreciate the program's widgets. These can embed YouTube videos on your pages, Google Maps, Facebook Like and Twitter buttons, media players, contact forms, news feeds and more.
All of this can be further tweaked or rearranged as necessary. You can even build a site from scratch if the bundled templates don't appeal. And once you've finished, the program will put the site online for you, either at your own web host or using 500MB of free web space included with the package.
Xara Web Designer is a very capable tool, but if you need more power then you may prefer the Premium edition. This adds tools to create presentations, animations (Flash and GIF) and single page "SuperSites". You get "sticky" objects (like a navigation bar which stays at the top of the page as users scroll), extra animations, advanced widgets (ecommerce, charts, photo sliders), and a pile of extra drawing and graphics tools.
Verdict:
Xara Web Designer is a good WYSIWYG web builder, easy to use and capable of producing quality results. If you need to produce anything more than a simple personal site we'd recommend the Premium edition, though - it's more expensive, but the extra power is worth the cost.
Your Comments & Opinion
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