Slick, graphics-rich, professional website designs aren’t limited to products built for the Web. A program long thought of as the sole province of graphics designers, CorelDraw offers a robust website creation option. For those who don’t have the time to invest in courses on HTML markup and Web programming, CorelDraw offers a practical alternative for designing a professional website. As you build your site in CorelDraw, periodically export your work as an HTML page to a file on your desktop to see how your page is shaping up. Once exported, double-click on the HTML file to load it into your favorite browser. This allows you to carefully inspect the layout in a Web-based environment without actually publishing your page the Internet. Should the page require tweaking, simply go back to CorelDraw, make adjustments and then export it again to create a new HTML file. Be cautious, though. While CorelDraw offers design capabilities with a subtle learning curve, the program outputs table-based HTML. This type of HTML markup often falls short of Worldwide Web Consortium standards and it may create compatibility problems from one browser to another. Though it is certainly possible to design a fully functional website using only CorelDraw’s WYSIWYG functionality, you may need to augment the design with a working knowledge of HTML markup and W3C-recognized document types. Problems with HTML markup typically come into play with more complex Web pages, so a good rule of thumb is to design pages with simplicity in mind. Writer Bio
