Designing your own professional website isn't too difficult if you want a simple navigation menu, contact info, a blog and other information. However, making it stand out isn't easy. The most obvious idea is to ask a professional web designer to create a site on your behalf, but in the current climate, this might not be feasible. The alternative is to do it yourself. On the Mac there are a range of web design tools that enable you to select a pre-designed template, drop in your components and publish directly to your server.

Xara Web Designer 5 is a brand new commercial tool designed to offer you the facility to design, build and publish your own site. Start from scratch or choose from one of the many different templates. Next, drop in the text, images and other components and then tweak and test in your web browser. Once finished, simply upload directly to your server and view live.

Xara Web Designer link.

04 Mar 2009