Labs

NetObjects Fusion 7.5 calls itself 'the smart way to build websites' and it's hard to disagree, as the program is simple, surprisingly powerful and creates impressive end results.

The secret of the program's success is its clean and streamlined workflow based on various modules or 'views' accessed from the large graphical toolbar. The first of these, and in many ways the most important, is the Site view, which provides an attractive hierarchical, family-tree style view of your site structure. You can quickly rough out your structure with the step-by-step Site Wizard, but it's just as easy to add, name and rearrange your pages from scratch.

Crucially, when you switch to Fusion's Page view, you'll see that this site hierarchy has been used to automatically add dynamic navigation bars (either as text links, image rollovers or even multilevel, fly-out menus) and these can be quickly customised, say, to link to all pages at the same level in the same

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section. At a stroke, one of the web designer's biggest headaches - maintaining site navigation - is removed.

Adding the rest of your page content in the Page view is just as simple: Fusion provides a wysiwyg layout editor in which you drag-and-drop freeform text boxes to create your layout, while tag and CSS-based formatting is handled via the Properties palette. You can also add graphics, form objects, rotating banners, Flash movies and even advanced datadrivenÊelements.

Moving on to the Styles view, you select from a reasonably wide range of pre-provided visual themes with more available via add-on packs. Select a theme and everything from the default banner and navigation bar down to heading and link formatting is updated across the entire site. Next, you're ready to switch to the Assets view to manage all the elements that make up your site and then finally to the Publish view. Here, you output your pages and all their associated files, then you upload them to your server.

It's almost impossible to go wrong and the results are bound to look good. However, it's important to realise that NetObjects Fusion has the same fundamental limitation as Web Easy Professional and WebPlus - since it saves your site to its own proprietary format and only produces the final HTML pages during the publishing process, there's no possibility of the user taking serious coding control. In other words, you have to take what you're given, which isn't necessarily the most efficient or powerful solution, so be aware of that beforeÊyou buy.