Page 442 - Xara Web Designer Premium

442 Website Widgets

Placeholder with default size Placeholder with reduced size
Similarly making the placeholder larger for such widgets will merely result in empty space
around the widget, on the page and in the placeholder image. For widgets like these
which don’t resize correctly when you resize the placeholder, it’s best to stick with the
original default size.
There are some widgets which can be improved by resizing the placeholder, even if the
widget itself doesn’t scale. Some widgets will fill the container into which they are
inserted, which may mean they come out much bigger than required, with blank areas
filling the space. You can experiment by resizing the placeholder for such widgets in
each direction and this may make the widget smaller without losing the key parts of the
widget.

For example this Form widget has rendered much too wide and tall and so there is
wasted space below and to the right of the form controls. Resizing it down doesn’t
change the size of the form controls, it just results in the form being cropped. The result
is a much neater form placeholder taking up much less space on the page.

Placeholder with default size Placeholder made narrower and shorter

Turning off placeholder re-generation
The placeholder image will be regenerated whenever you resize it or change the code or
file it’s attached to. Sometimes you may want to turn off that regeneration so that the
placeholder image won’t change again. You can do this by deselecting the checkbox at
the bottom of the PLACEHOLDER TAB in the "UTILITIES" > "WEB PROPERTIES DIALOG".

Adding widget placeholders manually

If you don’t want Xara Web Designer Premium to create a placeholder image
automatically, you can set one up yourself. First create a placeholder object (perhaps a
rectangle of the appropriate size or an imported image that you want to use to represent