Xara Web Designer 9

This is another very simple web page that took a few minutes to create.  This uses a couple of new photo Widgets. The top photo gallery has a nice mouse-over effect, and opens a slideshow of the pictures when you click.  You can control almost every aspect of the appearance of this gallery, from the hover animation effect, to the number of columns, thumbnail size, photo borders and shadow.

Google Fonts

Web Designer 9 provides direct access to more than 600 new fonts. The font picker is a fantastic way to find and preview the range available. It not only categorizes the fonts into different styles, but you can further sort them to only show fonts that have a family of weights, or even only those highest quality ‘hinted’ fonts, or by many other criteria. A single click is all that’s required to download and install the font to your computer (which are then available to all Windows programs). One key benefit of Google fonts is that the text remains selectable, and searchable (it’s SEO friendly) and is compatible with all modern (and most not-so-modern) web browsers. Three new Google fonts are used in this document. The unusual and flowery ‘Akronim’ font is the main heading (with a subtle soft shadow) . Source Sans Pro is used for the body text and Oswald for the sub-headings.

Text Handling

Web Designer includes some of the most advanced text handling features you’ll find from any web authoring software. It provides precise WYSIWYG layout (even the line breaks are the same on all browsers) and can repel around irregular shapes such as this circular picture (which is another new photo Widget).  So what you design is what your website visitors see. Note: Some of the features described here are only available in Web Designer Premium.

Xara Web Designer 9