Xara Web Designer review

Xara's web-design application tries to differentiate itself from its many template-driven contemporaries, such as Mr Site and XSite Pro, by appealing to hobbyist graphic designers.

It's the most flexible as far as layout goes, but this comes at the expense of usability and, to some extent, features.

You can start from scratch with a blank page or base your work round a predefined template. Curiously, we had to download and install the templates ourselves. After this initial confusion, though, we're happy to report that several of the layouts are rather fetching and show a little more imagination and design savvy than is typical for applications like this.

Unlike most template-based offerings, Web Designer's pages are highly customisable through an occasionally finicky and over-complicated user interface. You can amend almost every component of a template, and the designs react appropriately to edits. Drop a digital photo into a photograph slot, for example, and the software automatically adjusts the image for the web, changing its resolution accordingly. Built-in tools enable further refinement, such as contrast and cropping, and these edits are non-destructive, so you can undo them with a single-click. Many elements stretch to ensure that the content fits, which makes buttons and boxes easy to create and edit. Page elements also slide out of the way as you move others around the page.

Web Designer's text handling is adequate, although the interface is sometimes quirky, and it's too easy to zoom text rather than resize it. Some of the text-oriented functions weren't as impressive as we expected, either. For example, you can set text at any angle, but doing so converts everything to an image without 'alt' text, which is bad practice from a search engine standpoint. Although text can automatically flow around images, Xara Web Designer's HTML code is far messier than it need be. Browser compatibility isn't compromised, but it could slow your site and makes the code almost impossible to tweak manually afterwards. Publishing, thankfully, is a simple one-click affair.

After the initial excitement over the flexible layout tools, frustration sets in when dealing with aspects of web design that should be simple. Adding and targeting links is trickier than it should be, as is maintaining site-wide consistency of important page elements. This isn't helped by the pasteboard-style method of managing pages, which is more reminiscent of desktop publishing than web design. Producing final designs for print is very different from maintaining and updating a website.

What's more, most basic web-design packages, including Mr Site, provide a wide array of tools and useful extras. Xara Web Designer doesn't even offer automated image galleries (except embedded galleries from Google's Picasa) or contact forms for visitors to fill in.

This places the software in a fairly small niche: it's suitable for relative beginners who want flexible layout tools but are only interested in making static, non-interactive web pages. If that's the kind of site you want, Xara Web Designer fits the task and is good value, but most amateur web designers who want to create a site quickly will be better served by Mr Site.