coffeecup responsive site designer v2 review

#Coffeecup responsive site designer v2 review free#

There is a way to ‘embed a website’, which you could use to embed a blog from somewhere else, but this isn’t an elegant solution, and is the only major downside we could find. The one thing we couldn’t find was a blogging tool. There’s even a whole section dedicated to eCommerce, should you need to sell goods online. This is most obvious when working with speech bubbles: where you can easily reposition and resize the tail, for instance, and the end result just looks perfect. You can add speech bubbles, arrows, boxes, polygons, etc, to your pages, and those shapes have handles on various locations which you can use to effortlessly resize and reshape them. One we quite liked was the inclusion of Smart Shapes. These range from adding a QR code, to inserting Google AdSense sections, forms, or graphics, for instance. There’s also a host of widgets available to you, which you can use to add more versatility to your site. XWDP offers you a large selection of stock images to choose from (powered by Pixabay), which you can use throughout your site - it’s not the same as using your own photos of course, but if you’re not a photographer, or can’t get a photo you need for a specific look, it’s great that XWDP’s got your back with its own royalty-free library. You have access to stock images right from inside Xara Web Designer Premium (Image credit: Xara) Take stock This not only gives you immense design flexibility, it is also a great time saver when you do perform those changes. Instead, you can alter your theme colours at any time and all the pages are updated as you do so. Thanks to that feature, you aren’t forced with an original decision, or have to change all your pages manually should you change your mind about your site’s colours during the design process.

Those are site-wide colours which give your page a unique look.

One last such feature we’ll explore is the ability to alter theme colours. You can use this feature to make sure your navigation menu remains at the top of the screen, no matter how far you scroll down, enabling the visitors to always have easy access to other parts of your site, no matter where they find themselves. Sticky bitsĪnother welcome feature is the ability to lock certain objects on your screen. It’s a very nice modern effect which XWDP fully supports. This isn’t simply resizing the image to fit the screen, this is actually concealing the edges so as you increase the browser’s page, for instance, more of the image is revealed. Depending on the size of the browser page or the actual device’s screen, the background image will show more - or less - of its content. XWDP helps you make fully responsive sites, and this also includes intricate options such as resizing photos used as background images. XWDP makes it really easy to access those features, and apply them to your creation. These features create a much more dynamic feel to your design and encourages interaction. They work best when the pages are actually of the same dimension (which is a design issue, as when creating websites, one generally doesn’t need to think about such restrictions), and although fun, it feels more like a gimmick which could get pretty tedious if you visit the site often. Unlike the animations for objects we just discussed, these page animations are site-wide. You can for instance have the animation triggered as the cursor moves onto it, or animate you content as the visitor scrolls down the page.Īdding animations to objects is as easy as right-clicking (Image credit: Xara)Īnimations can also be added when moving from page to page, and there’s a host of options for this. You can animate your objects so they interact with the viewer. Modern sites take advantage of HTML5’s animation features, and XWDP is fully compliant with these. It’s like working in a desktop publishing application, and helps you make your page look exactly as you want it. By setting an object as “repulsive”, you’ll see text within a text box automatically wrap around that abject as you drag it, so nothing is obstructed. You can for instance sprinkle images throughout your text, wherever you want them to be. This restriction does make for a simpler service, but also curtails your creativity. If you check out some competing web-based services, you’ll notice nearly all limit where you can put your content on the page.

#Coffeecup responsive site designer v2 review free#

Templates come with multiple pages, which you are then free to totally customise (Image credit: Xara) Moving aroundĪnd this goes hand in hand with the ability to drag and drop whatever you’re adding to your page, exactly where you want it.