Page 22 - Xara Web Designer Premium

22 Getting Started

• Placeholders: These are graphic objects on the page which represent the size and
position of dynamic "widgets" such as a GIF animations, movies, or forms. When your
site is exported the placeholder graphic is replaced by the code required to make the
widget work and so the working widget appears at the same position on your page.
See the Website Widgets (on page 436) chapter in the pdf manual for details.

Right-click context menus

When you right-click any object in the Xara Web Designer Premium workspace, a drop-
down context menu lists useful operations that are relevant to the object clicked on. For
example, if you right-click a rectangle you've drawn previously, the drop-down menu
allows you to perform actions only relevant to a rectangle.

If you right-click a photo, however, some of the menu options that appear apply only to
photos, while others are similar to the actions you can perform on a rectangle. The
object-specific operations are listed towards the top of the right-click menu's list, e.g., in
the case of a rectangle the first three actions above apply only to rectangles.

You can also right click both the page and pasteboard to see a menu of page and
pasteboard background-related operations you can apply.

If you select more than one object and right-click, the menu lists actions specific to
multiple objects, such as group, align and combine, as well as the common operations
such as cut, copy and delete. Similarly if you right-click objects that you have previously
grouped, actions specific to a group are displayed.

It's recommended that you right-click any object or multiple objects in the workspace to
access the context menu specific to those objects. Once you've done this a few times
you will know which actions you can quickly perform with right-click menus.

Object Based Web Design

All the types of elements described above are collectively referred to as objects.

One of the unique benefits of Web Designer Premium is that you have complete freedom
to place any object anywhere on the page, and your website will faithfully reproduce this.

The SELECTOR TOOL can be used to select any object on the page, and to
move (just drag it), resize and rotate the objects.
You can adjust the stacking order (that is whether an object appears in front or behind
others on the page) by right clicking and choosing ARRANGE or using the ARRANGE menu
options. With the SELECTOR TOOL you can resize objects by dragging on the corner resize
handles. You can rotate any object by dragging just inside the corner selection
handles. And although websites do not support rotated text, Web Designer Premium
knows to automatically create the appropriate graphic image so the resulting page will
always look exactly right.