Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Webstyle 2
Xara has updated its web graphics generator. Iain Laskey gets clicking.
| Product | Webstyle 2 |
|---|---|
| Company | Xara |
| Web | www.xara.com |
| Price | $69 (upgrade from version 1 $39) plus VAT in Europe. |
| We like | |
| We don't like | |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
One of my personal bugbears when creating web pages is that I am no artist. I can't draw for a toffee and I can't visualise very well either so even a decent drawing package is of little use in my hands. As a result, my web pages used to be rather austere to put it mildly. Dull is another word. A couple of years ago Xara released Webstyle which looked to be the answer to my prayers inasmuch it used professionally designed templates to create buttons, separators and other onscreen "furniture".
It did a pretty good job when released but times have moved on and so Xara have updated Webstyle with new features, templates and control tweaks.
Overview
Webstyle works by presenting a selection of categories such as headings, buttons, backgrounds, bullets and so on. These are then presented as a series of examples that you can choose from. Once selected, you adjust the text, size, colours, shadow etc until you are happy with the result. Internally, Webstyle works with the images as vector graphics which means the quality is never lost no matter how much you change, rescale or edit the image. Only when you save the finished work is it converted to a bitmap in GIF, JPG or PNG format. You can adjust the number of colours or quality of the final image before saving at which point Webstyle will advise you of the final file size.
All on screen displays are in real-time so you can see exactly what effect each selection is going to make to the image. The full version of Webstyle includes around 1000 graphic templates although the 15 day trial download has rather less to play with. Webstyle also supports template sets where you can choose a look and then be provided with a complete set of matching graphic elements.
Rollover Beethoven
For me, the most useful of the new features is NavBars. You can now create a series of navigation buttons along with where they link to, rollover effects, layout and so on. Webstyle then generates the graphics plus appropriate HTML/Javascript code to make the whole thing work. This can then be cut and pasted in to the web page directly (I used FrontPage 2000). Instructions are included for a variety of web design packages. The system works well enough although I did need to tweak some of the generated code as it made assumptions about the layout of my web site's directory structure that wasn't right. However, this was trivial to fix. The resulting toolbars look good, work well and have plenty of flexibility built in to suit most people's requirements.
Another significant addition is the animated banner ad generator. These adhere to the standard size when output although you still have full control over the fonts, text and so on. As well as their intended use, I found many also worked well as eye-catching animated displays on pages for indicating things like page last updated information or important notices.
Buttons and headings now support multiple lines of text with each block in selectable fonts and sizes. Graphics can also have bevelled edges in most cases adding further variety to the look.
Company Logos
Webstyle includes facilities to generate company logos but to be honest, this part is rather limited and I can't see any real company using this as the chances of producing a logo similar to another firms' is rather too high for comfort.
Fine Tuning
As well as the enhancements mentioned so far, Webstyle 2 has added much more fine control over the resulting images. Text control is particularly noteworthy now supporting much more control over the exact layout and position of text.
You can use bitmap textures in many places and even rotate these within the image to get the look just right. However, you'd need to be careful with this if you intend combining a page background image with backgrounds in your graphic elements.
The final images can be saved with user selectable colour depths to help reduce file sizes. As the previews are all real-time, you can see immediately on screen what effect such changes will have on an image prior to using it in your pages.
Conclusion
Webstyle 1 was a useful tool although the lack of navigation bars was a serious letdown to an otherwise promising package. As a result you needed to do additional manual work with other programs to fill in the gaps in Webstyle's abilities. Version 2 adds navbars plus a host of other new features. The additional control provided over both existing and new elements results in a far more useful package that can now be strongly considered as your main source of web page graphics. More importantly, the resulting images actually look genuinely good. A quick check of the sample pages on Xara's website reveals some interesting examples but it is only when you start to use a bit of additional imagination with the layout that you can see just how good Webstyle's templates are.
Finally, as a real world test I gave my own graphically simple web site an overhaul using Webstyle 2 and it certainly looks a lot better for it. A big thumbs up for Webstyle 2!
