Support for text styles
Web Designer now supports Text Styles, a powerful way to alter the appearance of text throughout your document with just a few clicks.
Update an element of your Text Style eg font, color, line spacing etc, and all text with that Style applied throughout your document is instantly updated – headings, titles or body text. Consistent text styles help you create professional looking documents, and now it couldn’t be easier.
Styles are created, updated and applied via a new Styles drop-down menu on the Text Tool InfoBar.
Live Style preview
Simply select some text and then traverse the Style menu - the selection will change to show your text in each Style. It’s a quick and easy way to try out your Styles without having to actually select and undo each in turn.
Support for inline graphics
Web Designer MX now allows you to embed 'inline graphics' in text using a simple Paste operation. Embedded graphics are great for really small items on the line such as symbols, icons etc, and are treated just like a 'character', in other words they flow and follow the same formatting rules as a character embedded in the text.
New re-sizeable JavaScript Widgets
In previous versions of Web Designer only Flash Widgets could be resized, DHTML or JavaScript Widgets were fixed size. This release introduces re-sizeable JavaScript Widgets. All existing Widgets have been updated to this new level, and several new ones have been added.
Unlike Flash Widgets they are compatible with all modern devices including iPhone, iPads and Windows Phone 7, and do not require a Flash plug-in.
Click here to see the Widgets.
This is an example image effect Widget in mid-transition from one photo to the next. You can now resize this Widget to any size you require, and Web Designer automatically optimizes any images to be right for the website. It’s also possible to overlay any objects, text or graphics on top of Widgets, as shown here.
Enhancements to Widget handling
- You can now preview a Widget in the Widget document directly (you do not need to Close & Save it back to the original).
- When linking to other pages of your website from within a Widget editor, you’ll now see a list of all pages, making it very easy to link to any page in your website from within a Widget.
Graphical bullet & number lists
MX introduces the ability to use your own graphical designs for the bullet character or the number at the start of bullet or numbered lists, which can make a significant improvement in the presentation quality of any list.
You can use any of the in-built drawing and text tools to create your own bullet and number graphics and we also supply a collection of ready-made examples in the Designs Gallery.
Advanced users can also create stretchy backgrounds that grow to accommodate longer number strings (e.g. if you have more than 10 items on your list).
Designs Gallery, new templates and UI improvements
- 3 new web themes (usually sold for \$10 each) and new web graphic templates (see the previews).
- Existing themes have been updated to support new features, such as the smart page resizing and graphical bullets. Also in the updated templates many background items have been moved to the page background layer, which makes it much easier to move items around the page without accidentally moving background items.
- The Designs Gallery has been completely re-arranged and re-ordered to be more easily navigable.
- Live Designs Gallery. The Designs Gallery is now completely server linked, so we can update and add more templates, clipart, Widgets etc.
- 3000+ new items of traditional clipart and a collection of photo clipart (see examples).
Automatic object positioning & smart page resizing
In previous versions of Web Designer you had to manually adjust the position of items on your page as you edited or added more text. Similarly you had to drag the bottom of the page down to make it longer as your content grew.
No longer! Web Designer now has the ability to make growing text areas automatically push other objects down the page, and also lengthen the page automatically to accommodate the enlarged text areas. Creating websites based on templates will now be considerably easier and faster.
Embedded fonts
Web Designer MX’s font embedding technology overcomes the serious design limitation of having to stick to the very small selection of so called ‘web safe’ fonts. Our technique is compatible with the vast majority of modern web browsers and works by embedding a special version of the font on your website which the web browser can download and display.
The main benefit of using an embedded font (as opposed to turning text to graphics), is that search engines can see and index this text. Plus visitors to your page can also select and copy this text, like any normal text.
This feature provides a considerably enhanced degree of design freedom for web designers.
New Chart & QR Code Widgets
There is a new chart drawing Widget included which lets you create interactive charts and graphs for your website.
The Charts use interactive DHTML and SVG to render the chart in the
browser, which responds to mouse-over to highlight particular chart
values. You can also click on the key names (in this case John, etc) to
redraw the chart with those values excluded.
The new QR Code widget allows you to communicate text or the web address of the page that it is inserted on.
Click here to see the chart & graph Widgets.
Enhanced presentations
We've enhanced presentations in Web Designer MX Premium in a number of ways.
- Slide navigation
Move your mouse to the lower left corner of the browser window in any page of your presentation and you’ll now see a pop-up page navigation control that includes a menu of all slides, allowing you to jump directly to any slide. Plus there’s handy Previous, Home and Next controls.
- Layer-less bullet lists
The new graphical bullet and numbered list feature (see below for more info on this feature) creates automatic presentation steps (each bullet or numbered item is treated as a separate step in the presentation). This makes a huge improvement to usability and productivity when creating lists.
- Page & Layer Gallery - Change page transition
You can now select multiple pages in the Page & Layer Gallery – this is handy for presentations because you can then use the right-click menu ‘Web page properties’ to alter the page animation transition for all the selected pages.
Pop-Up Layer 'click to close' option
You can now choose whether you want your pop-up layers to close automatically, or only when a viewer clicks a close box.
In document pop-up link checker
When you click on any item with a web link in Web Designer (not on the web page), a small pop-up appears giving you the option to follow the link, change it, or remove it - very useful if you want to test a link or view the linked page while you’re working on the document.