Netvibes Creates Web Design Tools for Everyone

Article by Martin Manoy on September 01, 2009 at 03:57:01

Netvibes creates web design tools for everyone For those who wish to customize their web pages but have little design knowledge or training, Netvibes, a popular personal web portal, has just produced Netvibes Theme Publishing, a suite of online tools that makes basic page creation easy.

"Netvibes offers designers the best of all worlds: live drag-and-drop layouts and page publishing, deep built-in content libraries and user interactivity - and now with our new Theme Publishing - complete control over every design aspect of their pages," said Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini.

The new tools are designed to make two essential tasks easy. The first is page creation, which the tools facilitate by allowing for the selection of elements such as colors, layouts and backgrounds with no more than a few clicks. The second is exporting, which is also made simple so that themes designed using the new Netvibes tools can be used on any website of the user''s choice without much effort.

For advanced designers, there is an XML-based theme API that allows users to create animated themes.

As more control is offered to web users via tools like these, web designers must increase their knowledge of the latest services and learn to incorporate them into their set of services. To learn more about the latest developments in web design, speak to an administrator of a web design education program.

Source: http://www.design-training.com/

Microsoft releases new version of Web design tools

May 1, 2008 (IDG News Service) Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a version of its tool set for Web and multimedia designers that includes the first native support for its Silverlight technology across all of the products in the suite.

Expression Studio 2 includes five products: Expression Web for Web design; Expression Blend for multimedia and 3-D design; Expression Design for graphic design; Expression Media for storing and sharing multimedia assets; and Expression Encoder for video encoding. The new release marks the first time that Encoder is in the suite as a full-fledged product, said Wayne Smith, Microsoft group product manager for Expression Studio.

In the new release, all of the products now have support for Silverlight, Microsoft's multimedia runtime for running live and streaming video on the Web. Previously, only Expression Web had support for Silverlight, but it was very limited, Smith said.

In a sense, this is the first full release of Expression, as Silverlight is a key component of Microsoft's design strategy and overall plan to compete with Adobe Systems' Creative Suite and its Flash technology. Expression Studio has only been in the market about a year, but Smith said that the company is not sharing customer-adoption information. However, he said that judging from the interest in preview versions of Expression Studio 2, the inclusion of Silverlight should increase sales of Expression overall.

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