Significantly enhanced NavBar handling and DHTML menu support
- A new NavBar 'object' which can be dragged around as a single graphic
- Take any button design and quickly turn it into a horizontal or vertical NavBar
- Intelligent automatic button stretching so the button width adjusts as you edit the button text
- Option to have all buttons the same width or each to be as wide as the text label
- Ability to create an automatic NavBar with buttons linked to all pages of your website. The NavBar is updated as you add / remove pages
- Auto-highlighting of 'current page' NavBar buttons
- Support for DHTML sub-menus with various animation and transparency effects
Drag 'n' drop Widgets from the Designs Gallery, and a new Widget library
New sections in the Designs Gallery provide a wide range of 'widgets' which can be drag & dropped onto your website. The Widgets provide interactive website add-ons ranging from movie players, to e-commerce features (e.g. a 'Buy' button to sell goods or services from your website) forms, maps and lots more.
An easy way to add links to (and upload) external files such as PDF, Flash and Word files
You can link to external files using a new option in the Link dialog. Selecting a file such as a Word document will attach the file and upload it to your website. Clicking the link on the website will let your visitor download (or open) the file. You can also drag & drop .PDF and .SWF (flash) files onto the page which will also attach the file to the website for upload next time you Publish. In the case of Flash (.swf) files these are embedded into the page and a static preview is automatically created. This can be resized on the page. In the case of PDF files a PDF icon is added to the page, and the PDF file uploaded to your website which if clicked will open the PDF file in the web browser.
Incremental Publishing
When you publish your website Web Designer now uploads only the files changed since the last publish operation. This provides a huge performance gain when editing large websites, particularly if you have large attachments such as video files.
Named FTP profiles
You can save the your FTP settings into a named profile, especially useful if you manage multiple websites under different domains. The Profile list can contain third party profiles, such as Magix free web hosting.
Totally re-designed application appearance
There's an all-new look to Web Designer, including modern skin and icons. You can see some screenshots
here.
New 'complete website' designs
Every theme now includes a ready-made fully linked up 8-page website, so you can quickly and easily create whole sites.
'Anchored' graphics (so photos and graphics flow with the text)
In the Text tool there's a new option to embed a graphic into the flowing text story as an anchored object. You can still drag the graphic wherever you like, but it will then remain tied to the anchor point in the text.
New Page & Layer Gallery, with a new 'Solo' mode
The new Page & Layer Gallery provides a quick way to view and re-arrange pages and layers on each page, for example offering drag & drop re-ordering of pages. There's also a new 'Solo' mode which allows a specific layer to be viewed and worked on in isolation.
Automatic save and restore of open documents on application closedown
You can now just close Web Designer (or shut down your computer) and Web Designer saves all open documents and restores them the next time you start the program.
New fly-out tools and buttons
Fly-out tools and buttons present a simpler user interface, but with direct one-click access to a wider range of common functions. Many buttons now have a fly-out menu with related options. These buttons have been carefully designed so that you can still get to the main function with a single click of the button, but also very quickly access any of the additional options without any extra clicks.
HTML snippets can be pasted directly into your document, with an automatic preview/placeholder created
Many website add-ons and widgets provide a snippet of HTML to embed into your page. Web Designer can now accept just pasting this snippet. What's more, it detects this is an HTML snippet and automatically creates a placeholder on the page, with a static preview of the snippet. Now it couldn't be easier to add snippets to your page, and you can position them anywhere on your web page.
Automatic backup of all open documents
A new set of controls in the Options dialog provides an automatic backup facility where the program can regularly save copies of all open documents. You can set the folder where these backups are saved, and how often the backup occurs.
FTP details can be stored with the document
The Publish Properties dialog now offers the ability to save the FTP details with the document. This is great if you have multiple websites published to different server locations or under different domains. In addition you can choose to save the FTP password with the file (to be used with caution!).
Free web hosting offer
Web Designer now comes with a free website hosting offer from MAGIX, so you can publish your website as part of Magix-Online world. The offer includes 500MB of storage and your own web address.
A large selection of new designs in the Designs Gallery
Many of the existing designs have been updated plus there's a large collection of completely new designs, both themes and individual web graphics including new NavBar and 'graphics' folders. You can see a preview of all page themes
here.
Enhanced Text tool
The Text tool has been improved to include bullets, numbered lists and indents.
Easy MP4 video upload and built-in video player
Drag 'n' drop an MP4 video file onto the page, and it embeds a Flash video player to play the file, and automatically uploads the video file to your web-server!
Auto-updating Designs Gallery
The Designs Gallery includes new 'download' sections and content, that can be updated remotely by Xara.
New sections in the Designs Gallery provide a wide range of 'widgets' which can be drag & dropped onto your website. The Widgets provide interactive website add-ons ranging from movie players, to e-commerce features (e.g. a 'Buy' button to sell goods or services from your website) forms, maps and lots more.
You can link to external files using a new option in the Link dialog. Selecting a file such as a Word document will attach the file and upload it to your website. Clicking the link on the website will let your visitor download (or open) the file. You can also drag & drop .PDF and .SWF (flash) files onto the page which will also attach the file to the website for upload next time you Publish. In the case of Flash (.swf) files these are embedded into the page and a static preview is automatically created. This can be resized on the page. In the case of PDF files a PDF icon is added to the page, and the PDF file uploaded to your website which if clicked will open the PDF file in the web browser.
When you publish your website Web Designer now uploads only the files changed since the last publish operation. This provides a huge performance gain when editing large websites, particularly if you have large attachments such as video files. 
You can save the your FTP settings into a named profile, especially useful if you manage multiple websites under different domains. The Profile list can contain third party profiles, such as Magix free web hosting.
There's an all-new look to Web Designer, including modern skin and icons. You can see some screenshots here.
Every theme now includes a ready-made fully linked up 8-page website, so you can quickly and easily create whole sites.
The new Page & Layer Gallery provides a quick way to view and re-arrange pages and layers on each page, for example offering drag & drop re-ordering of pages. There's also a new 'Solo' mode which allows a specific layer to be viewed and worked on in isolation.
Fly-out tools and buttons present a simpler user interface, but with direct one-click access to a wider range of common functions. Many buttons now have a fly-out menu with related options. These buttons have been carefully designed so that you can still get to the main function with a single click of the button, but also very quickly access any of the additional options without any extra clicks.
Many website add-ons and widgets provide a snippet of HTML to embed into your page. Web Designer can now accept just pasting this snippet. What's more, it detects this is an HTML snippet and automatically creates a placeholder on the page, with a static preview of the snippet. Now it couldn't be easier to add snippets to your page, and you can position them anywhere on your web page.
A new set of controls in the Options dialog provides an automatic backup facility where the program can regularly save copies of all open documents. You can set the folder where these backups are saved, and how often the backup occurs.
The Publish Properties dialog now offers the ability to save the FTP details with the document. This is great if you have multiple websites published to different server locations or under different domains. In addition you can choose to save the FTP password with the file (to be used with caution!).
Web Designer now comes with a free website hosting offer from MAGIX, so you can publish your website as part of Magix-Online world. The offer includes 500MB of storage and your own web address.
Many of the existing designs have been updated plus there's a large collection of completely new designs, both themes and individual web graphics including new NavBar and 'graphics' folders. You can see a preview of all page themes here.
The Text tool has been improved to include bullets, numbered lists and indents.
Drag 'n' drop an MP4 video file onto the page, and it embeds a Flash video player to play the file, and automatically uploads the video file to your web-server!
The Designs Gallery includes new 'download' sections and content, that can be updated remotely by Xara.