Review: Xara Menu Maker
| Product | Menu Maker |
|---|---|
| Company | Xara |
| Web | www.xara.com |
| Price | $19 (+VAT in Europe) download $29 for CD version |
| We like | Ease of use, attractive results, integration with 3rd party apps |
| We don't like | Nothing at this price |
| Rating | 8/10 |
| Requirements |
Instant Navigation Buttons for the Masses
Xara's excellent Webstyle tool is a jack of all trades when it comes to creating web page graphics. It creates any sort of graphics you may need for a web page and can even create fully functional animated navigation buttons. Xara have had the rather inspired idea of chopping off this menu making part and selling it as a standalone product. At only $19+VAT for the download version, it is considerably cheaper than Webstyle so will it attract an audience?
How Does it Work?
Menu Maker can be used in two ways although the differences are minimal. You can use it purely as a standalone tool and then cut and paste the results yourself in to a web page. If however you use either FrontPage or Dreamweaver, you can have it integrate with these tools in such a way that you can call it directly from menus within these two programs.
In Use
To create a menu, you choose one of over 250 "professionally designed styles" (would anyone offer you a choice of amateur ones?) before getting down to the nitty gritty.
Down the left hand side is a list of attributes such as texture or size. Each attribute brings up a dialog box that allows you to fiddle away with the different settings. Some are more complex that others but the exceptionally friendly online help is at your command. As well as the basic help, you can call up the "Tell me More" function which lets you choose a task you want to be led through.
Using these attribute buttons you can add buttons to your menu, choose fonts, textures, sizes and so on. The size aspect is interesting in that the buttons are always rendered using vector based designs so no matter how big or small you make them, you never get any "jaggies". This way there is no loss of quality and all your buttons should look pin sharp. When you have finished, you simply save the image as a bitmap and the job is done.
The best part of all is that Menu Maker also generates the JavaScript and HTML code needed to animate and operate the menus. You literally just drop the finished code in to your page. I did find I had to do some minor editing to sort out paths where I wanted to store the button images but in many cases it worked fine first time. Because the system generates the code it is also capable of creating mouse-over changes and drop down menus with excellent looking results. Xara also claim their system generates far more optimised menus both in terms of code and graphics when compared to other systems on the market - as much as a 50% reduction in size. This translates to faster loading web pages which can only be a Good Thing.
Conclusion
As a standalone program Xara Menu Maker works fine. The results are good and the integration with leading HTML packages is a bonus. The only real problem I can see is that whilst this program will create your menus, you'll have to work hard to make the rest of your page match the look and you may well be better off buying the full Webstyle package anyway.
If you think you can live with just the menu creation functionality then for $19 you won't go far wrong. The results will ensure your web pages have a polished and functional look that you'd be hard pushed to beat if you did it all manually. You certainly wouldn't be able to do it as quickly.
You can try before you buy by visiting http://www.xara.com/downloads/menumaker/ and downloading the 4.75Mb demo.
