New Xara Web Designer for Stunning Graphical Websites

Launched today is the new Xara Web Designer that is unlike any other web page software; it allows complete free-form, anything, anywhere web page design. It does this with absolutely no HTML or JavaScript skills required. Xara Web Designer is perfect for creating graphical webpages containing text, graphics, photos, widgets and Flash.

For the novice or time-restricted user it includes a set of ready-made professionally designed templates and graphics. The customizable graphics include headings, navigation buttons, logos, text panels and speech bubbles that can be simply dragged and dropped from the Designs Gallery onto the page. Buttons and headings dragged onto the page will automatically assume the theme color.

All aspects of the design can be customized. Users can re-arrange all page elements, add their own text, graphics and photos anywhere. It’s genuinely WYSIWYG, what you see in Xara Web Designer is exactly what you get on your web page.

Xara Web Designer introduces a number of new innovative web authoring software features. It’s the first to provide automatic text flow around photos and even irregular shapes. What has until now been almost impossibly difficult in other web authoring tools, creating irregular edged text flows, is now easy.

Included are graphics tools to allow creation and free mixing of vector graphics, photos and text, anywhere on the page. Having to use two or three separate software applications, one for your graphics, one for optimizing photos and your HTML editing tool, is a thing of the past. This single low-cost software provides all three – resolution independent vector graphics, ultra-fast photo editing and optimisation, and text layout all producing the HTML for your website.

The integrated, non destructive, ultra fast photo tool has many enhancement functions including automatic adjustment of photos to the correct web resolution.

The powerful text tool provides easy text entry as single lines or as columns with auto text flow between columns or pages and text flow around objects. There’s also a check-as-you-type spell checker.

Xara Web Designer is unique in providing single-click re-coloring of all graphical elements throughout the entire website. You can take any template and re-color it or your entire website to your personal taste in a second or two.

Xara Web Designer can intelligently adapt graphics such as buttons and heading to accommodate any label text – stretching as you type, and automatically creates optimized graphics. So a process of creating highly detailed, graphical elements such as a button, customized to accommodate any length text, in any color, is now possible in a few few seconds, with no graphics skills at all.

Xara Web Designer offers automatic CSS layer creation (including semi-transparent objects), easy rollover and pop-up effects, photo thumbnails and more.

Very efficient Flash animations can easily be created with Xara Web Designer and users can also add widgets to their site such as Googlemaps, YouTube movies, Picasa photo albums, newsfeeds and many, many more. Using a simple FTP upload the website can be published in seconds.

Managing Director, Charles Moir says, “The few professional web designers that have seen demonstrations of early versions have stood open-mouthed. They have just one question – how on earth can it do that?

For professional designers Xara Web Designer can act as a supreme Rapid Prototyping Tool. But the largest market for us is consumers who want great looking website who do not know, and don’t want to know, anything about HTML, graphics creations, JavaScript etc.

For the consumer, the ability to customize any of the large range of ready made templates is perfect. Xara’s unique ‘flow-around’ text and automatically stretching buttons and panels, automatic creation of optimized graphics (such as buttons, headings etc – in whatever theme colour they like) means anyone can create a really high quality website, customized to their exact needs – and they need know nothing whatsoever about HTML.

For the designer Xara Web Designer provides unprecedented design freedom. Absolute freedom to place anything anywhere on the page, to mix text, graphics, photos, to wrap text around irregular shapes. It produces cross browser, W3C compliant, XHTML, and things like pop-ups, mouse-over effects are all easy.

I believe Web Designer is a revolutionary product.” concluded Charles Moir.

Xara Web Designer operates on Windows XP/Vista and costs just $49

For more information see   – xara.com

Example website tutorial   – webdesigner.xara.com

Demo Movies    – http://xara.com/webdesigner/demos

EDITORS’ NOTES

Contact:

For more details or a review copy of Xara Web Designer please contact: Nova Fisher, nova {at} xara(.)com Tel: +44 1392 209509

About Xara Web Designer

Xara Web Designer is not an HTML editor. It’s aimed at graphic designers who want complete design freedom, without the hassle of hacking the HTML and at equally at consumers who don’t want to learn anything about HTML but want to create great looking websites.

Xara Web Designer automatically creates optimized web graphics and images. e.g. it produces alpha channel PNGs to support transparency effects, soft shadows and more. It produces optimized JPEG automatically from any sized digital image. It automatically converts headings and text using non-standard fonts into the correct graphic format to ensure absolute WYSIWYG accuracy. It produces W3C compliant HTML, cross-browser, cross platform XHTML, compatible with all modern browsers.

It operates on Windows XP/Vista with 256MB RAM and 100MB of available disc space.

About Xara

Xara has been developing mass-market software since 1981, the early Microcomputer era. It has focused mostly on publishing related software products, starting from Wordwise, a hugely popular Word Processor in the ’80s, to desktop publishing software (Impression) and graphics products in the ’90s for the Acorn RISC computer. Xara’s first Windows product, Xara Studio, was quickly snapped up and marketed by Corel in the late ’90s as CorelXara. The rights were acquired back from Corel and it has since evolved into the successful Xara Xtreme. .

Xara has a particularly strong technology and innovation history. It pioneered many of the graphics technologies and techniques used by the industry today. It was the first to introduce vector anti-aliasing, the first with vector transparency and graduated transparency and the first with vector feathering. Many of its User Interface techniques have been adopted by the industry. The graphics engine that is at the core of Xara Xtreme and Web Designer still remains the world’s most powerful.

In January, 2007, Xara Ltd was acquired by Magix AG from Berlin, Germany. The company now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary.