Make your websites eye-catching and dynamic with our smart new 'eye catcher' widgets that enable you to add an advanced selection of slick photo and text animations to your web pages without the need for coding knowledge. More widgets will be automatically downloaded and added to your gallery over time.

See the 'eye catcher' widgets

Plus there's a neat new 'embed a website' Widget - perfect for embedding blogs, microsites and other sites within your page.

Web Designer makes it easy to add a wide range of animated effects to the layers and page links in your website. You can add animated transitions to any page link or pop-up layer in your web pages.

Web Designer now supports the addition of favicons, allowing you to customize the tabs of your web pages by displaying a custom graphic, such as a logo, on the document browser tab.

The navigation buttons in the top bar of the preview window allow you to move back or forward, just like in a web browser, and the Home button returns you to the page you started the preview on.

You can now preview your web page in full screen by clicking the new View Full Screen button in Web Designer's built-in Preview window. When you next use preview, Web Designer remembers the last used mode (normal, maximized or full screen). and displays subsequent previews in the same way.

You can browse and delete files and folders on your FTP server using Web Designer's built-in Web Space Explorer.

Create web-based 'slide-show' style presentations that your website visitors can step through using the keyboard arrow keys. Apply animated transition effects as each step and page is displayed. You can also easily remotely host a web meeting (a 'Webinar') to showcase your presentation, step by step and page by page, to a group of invited participants.

Example presentation
See the presentation templates
Remote presentation manager

Web Designer now automatically updates all occurrences of a repeating object when you edit it, so you don't have to manually update when you make a change. When one instance of a repeating object is edited, the updates appear instantly on all other instances of that object on other pages of the document. What’s more, Web Designer is smart about positioning, so objects in the top half of the page are positioned on other pages relative to the top of the page, and objects near the bottom are positioned relative to the bottom of the page, irrespective of page sizes.

You can now automatically generate a sitemap to assist search engines crawling your site.

If you have Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari or Chrome installed, you can preview exactly how your page will appear in each of these popular web browsers with a single click.

A new range of templates gives you an even greater design choice when creating your websites.

See the templates

Web Designer now provides ‘magic’ magnetic object snapping. As you drag an object, it ‘snaps’ to points and lines of interest nearby and indicates what it has snapped to by displaying dynamic snap lines and points.  This makes it easy to align objects with each other, or with guidelines or the page center or edges.

Creating anchored objects is now a one-click action and objects that you anchor in text now also repel text, helping you create a wrap-around effect easily. Repel margins can also now be defined separately for the margin width and height. Also anchored objects can be constrained to move vertically only, which is very useful where you have objects to the right or left of the text that need to move only up and down.

This provides a really simple way to draw single-segment straight lines and a new way to control the arrow head and tail on any line.

Tabs at the top of the Web Designer window show clearly which document you are currently viewing, the document type and whether there are unsaved changes. See at a glance which documents you have currently open and gain access to them by just clicking on the document tab.

A new gallery bar gives instant access to all galleries, which now fly out as you hover the mouse pointer over a new gallery bar. It's easy to move galleries around the workspace, and you can pin and dock them wherever you want, either individually or in groups or 'stacks' on top of each other.

When creating new shapes such as rectangles, ellipses and quickshapes you'll now see a solid filled shape as you drag across the page (instead of an outline). It's far more WYSIWYG, you'll see the correct fill and line color as you drag. This works even if you have a fat line.

There is a major change in the way that attributes (the appearance or 'style' of an object) are applied to a newly drawn object or line. Now a new object can take on the style of the last selected object, rather than the last drawn. It sounds like a small change, but is more intuitive and more powerful - for example you can copy the style of any object by just selecting it then drawing a new object.

• A new default Page & Layer Gallery ‘pages’ mode displays a narrow list of page thumbnails – for easy page selection and access.
• Web Designer initially displays an uncluttered single page view. Use the Page & Layer Gallery to quickly move to different pages, or switch to multi-page view by right clicking on the page and selecting the multi-page view option on the menu.

Web Designer includes many customizable graphic templates of course, and a good set of basic drawing tools, but Premium 7 now includes a range of additional graphic creation tools for those who wish to create their own graphics from scratch. These include freehand and quickshape drawing tools, bevel, mould and 3D extrude. Plus additional photo features such as content aware scaling and zooming and masking.

New paste operations bring much more flexibility to pasting operations, allowing Paste position, Paste size, Paste replacing selection, Paste in current layer and Paste in place in current layer.

Web Designer now allows you to export any animation or non-animation document as an AVI file, helping you create your own web-ready movie content.

Quick alignment of selected objects is made possible by the new right click menu option 'Align'. This enables you to directly align multiple objects horizontally and vertically, without having to open the alignment dialog.

MP4 movie files added to your website will now play without Flash installed if the browser supports HTML5 video, so movies play on iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

A hierarchical arrangement of the Designs Gallery makes it far easier to find the template you're looking for at a glance.

A new option in the Website tab of the Website Properties dialog allows you to choose whether or not to clip objects to web page edges. If you do not clip, then any objects overlapping your page on to the pasteboard will be displayed in full, rather than cropped to the page border. In addition, any animated transitions you apply will now start from the browser window edge rather than the page border.

Clearer Infobar text rendering brings greater screen display quality and clarity to all Web Designer toolbars, if ClearType text is enabled in your Windows' control panel.

The Optimize Photo dialog now includes the option to maintain the photo’s current resolution.

You can now prevent objects on the current layer from repelling text on other layers using the new "Text repelling within layer" option in the Layer Properties dialog. This option also stops text on the current layer being repelled by objects on higher layers. This is useful for (and is set by default on) popup layers in web documents.

Improved context sensitive menus offer direct access to useful actions. Right-click on objects, page or pasteboard for instant access to many useful operations relevant to the object.

When you publish your website, you can now choose to submit your site for possible inclusion in the User Galleries hosted by Xara/MAGIX.

Web Designer now allows you to enter HTML code into the head of your web pages, as well as the body, giving you greater versatility to customize your website. You can easily add your own code (or code from a widget provider) into individual pages or all pages in your website. Also code entry for either the head or body is easier with a new larger pop-up code editing dialog.