All of the breakthrough website creation and publishing features found in Web Designer 6 are also in Xara Designer Pro 6. I will cover a few of the key new features here. For a more in depth review see Workbook 81, Web Designer 6 First Look. H    1    2    3    4    5    Download Zipped Tutorial WEBSITE AND WEBSITE GRAPHICS CREATED WITH XARA DESIGNER PRO 6 The real hot button in the new Website Properties fly out menu is the last one: Create Navigation Bar. Simply put, you can now create one master button, with mouse over effect, and let Designer Pro 6 create a button bar for your entire website. With fly out or drop down sub- menus. The basic dialog is shown above with four main pages. Press Menu Style and you can customize the fly out or drop down menus to match your original buttons. The auto-generated fly out and drop down menu buttons can only be rectangular and can only have a solid color fill. Buttons can expand to fit different text lengths. In the Designer Pro 6 Buttons and Menu dialog, you can rename the text for your page buttons, add links both internal, external, and add sub-menus. And as with the Page and Layer Gallery, you can drag and drop a page to a new location. You can add a “Separator” between buttons on the sub-menus as shown above on the right. Here is a working example of a button bar created with Xara Designer Pro 6. The HOME and PAGE 1-4 buttons link to the appropriate pages in this Workbook. The PAGE 5 button has three fly out sub menus. A Contact button that links to my e-mail address, a link to Xara.com and a link to a pop up layer. Go ahead and try it out. Notice too that PAGE 5, the page you are currently on, is highlighted. If this button bar were on all the pages, the highlight would change to indicate the current page. Also notice, if you will, that the pop up photo linked to from the PAGE 5 fly out is transparent and shows the text and buttons beneath. Try doing this in any other application. And not only that, you can still select the buttons under the pop up photo. Awesome? You bet! Form Widgets Want to add a form to your website? Piece of cake! I added the form above simply by modifying one of the Form Widgets  found in the Designs Gallery. It works. Try it out. If you use your real e- mail address I will respond. And one of the best things is you get an actual preview of how the form will look right on the page. No more vague gray placeholder rectangles. Xara Designer Pro 6 has more Widgets than you could shake a stick at. You can add widgets for Facebook and Twitter, YouTube videos, Picasa Galleries, PayPal, Google, Amazon.com, shopit, and cartfly e-commerce Widgets. There are widgets for Google search, NY Times headlines, famous quotations, Skype buttons. Even something called Nabble. Mouse over this clock (It’s another widget). Slide Shows You asked for slide shows. Xara Designer Pro 6 gives them to you. And it couldn’t be easier. Drag a photo or group of photos onto the page, resize them, check Pop-up Photo, set a width size, and click Options. In the Pop-up Photo Options dialog select your options, including Automatically Start Slide Show, get your pop corn and sit back and enjoy the show. Here’s a link to a slide show on my website that was created in minutes in Designer Pro 6. (Close the slide show browser window to return). Did you notice the cool repeating background behind the page? I know, it’s kind of hard to miss. Hold down the Ctrl key, and drag and drop a color or bitmap onto the pasteboard (the gray area off the page) to add a bitmap background to your website. (Jim and Bob, I hope you notice how seamlessly my bitmaps tile!) I added an orange outline so you could see the bitmap. It’s not on the bitmap itself. I edited a color in the Color Editor and used Steve Ledger’s cool tip to Ctrl drag and drop the color swatch from the Color Editor and drop it onto the page. It is worth mentioning again that you can now preview a single web page or the entire website by clicking either of the two Export and Preview buttons on the Website Properties Infobar. Link Properties has its own link next to the Export and Preview  buttons. If you can imagine it, you can probably link to it. Including a PDF or Microsoft Word document. Browse to the location of the file and it is automatically added to the site when you publish. It could be simpler but if it was I would probably be sitting in your chair and doing it for you (I would prefer you do this yourself however). Want to add a Flash movie or an MP4 file to your site. Just drag and drop the file onto the page. Designer Pro 6 creates the appropriate player to show the video. And Designer Pro 6 generates a preview image. Being a big time video director just got easier! If you copy an HTML snippet (such as a link to a YouTube video) to the clipboard, you can right click on the page, select Paste HTML Placeholder and in seconds, Designer Pro 6 will create preview image and player. I’m not sure about you, but for me I prefer this simple approach a lot more than all the hoops we had to jump through in Xtreme 5 Pro to accomplish the same thing. Your website can look like it was designed by a pro. Because for those of you who are busy making money and would rather let someone else do the designing, this is your lucky day. Xara Designer Pro 6 has a large group of professionally designed website templates which you can customize to fit your needs and to fit your identity. The Technical Template shown above is as handsome as it is practical. What a great way to present your product or service to the world. The Designs Gallery has lots of pro designed buttons, banners and more good things. There is much that I have not covered, but if I show you everything there will be no surprises. You know what I mean? Now I know there are some of skeptics out there who are saying, yeah, well why should I buy Designer Pro 6 now? If I just wait a month or two Web Designer 7 will be out. It could happen. But based on the last few releases I think you might be waiting the better part of a year. So don’t wait, download the FREE fully functional 30-day Xara Designer 6 Pro trial version and see for yourself. You won’t be disappointed. There is something for everyone in this new release and I am pretty sure you are going to like it. A lot. Your comments, questions, suggestions and as always, your corrections are always appreciated. Use the send e-mail link below to send me your thoughts. Gary W. Priester Your Editor Send e-mail