One-click link editing is also a great new feature in Xara Web Designer MX 8. Xara’s built-in tools for image editing, quick shapes, drawing, and fonts make it easy, and this is one area Xara Web Designer really excels. Instead, you can create an SVGA (760 pixels wide), VGA (640 pixels wide), or XVGA (955 pixels wide) Web page from scratch.

If you have design experience, you won’t need to use Xara Web Designer’s templates.

If this seems problematic, try SiteSpinner (also $50) or WYSIWYG Web Builder ($45) both slightly harder to use, but more technically-focused website design tools. Also, much of your Xara-designed site won’t work if your end user is using NoScript or has scripting disabled in the browser.

Even though Xara Web Designer MX 8 has a function to extend the bottom of the page, the pages are static and Xara Web Designer is truly WYSIWYG: Everything you place on the page will show up exactly as you place it, regardless of the browser size of the reader. Oddly, Xara Web Designer’s templates all seem to measure about 770 pixels wide–just wider than a SVGA screen, and allowing for a very large border on a XVGA screen.