Product Reviews

Web-development software traditionally comes in two flavours, and the variety you choose will depend on whether you design for a living or just want to create your own site. If you're a professional developer, you'll be looking at products like Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, where you'll find precise layout sophistication, heavyweight code crunching and integrated applications development.

Likewise, for the personal or small business user, there's always been the old favourite Microsoft FrontPage 2002. Here you'll find ease of use and accessibility a priority, but sophisticated results will be more difficult to obtain without direct hand coding.

With the launch of the latest version of NetObjects Fusion, however, all this is about to change. At last, the small business user can have powerful layout control and a sophisticated but easy-to-use development environment, while the occasional developer can access the code, tools and applets as required.

Best of both worlds?

The most obvious difference between a product like FrontPage or Dreamweaver and NetObjects Fusion is the way the software works behind the scenes. For instance, Fusion won't open an existing web page directly; instead, you have to import pages or sites if they've been created elsewhere. This isn't a problem, because normally you'll be making sites and pages from scratch, but it's an interesting hint at the way the software works.

Fusion can be most easily compared to a DTP application in that it uses proprietary file formats and outputs the result according to your specifications. The benefit is that you can place anything on the page wherever you like and the software deals with it. If your design breaks those boring old HTML formatting rules that say something can't overlap, for example, you'll be shown an exclamation mark on the object. You might not see anything at all if your site-output settings use the latest CSS (cascading style sheet) positioning. In effect, you decide how backward compatible you want the results to be and the software does the rest, which is exactly how it should be.

Can you imagine creating the next company brochure in Microsoft Word, for example, and worrying about the syntax of the paragraph and table tags and whether that image would print just where you placed it on the page? Coding may well be the ultimate means of making a web application do what you want, but formatting HTML tags should be invisible by now and Fusion goes a long way to making this a reality.

The Fusion 7 interface offers a choice of either wysiwyg page design mode, HTML source view or page preview - all as tabbed sections of the main design screen. The HTML view shows all the code that will be generated by Fusion when you publish your site. You can't edit this, but you can, if you wish, add your own code in between and it will be published unaltered.

Around the Design view are various toolbars that offer components and elements you're able to select and then place on the page. These include layout sections, textboxes, tables, images, banners and navigation bars. There's no need to delve into the joys of nested tables just to get the page looking how you wish. You simply stretch a layout to the size you want and then add text and images in their own boxes - all positioned accurately.

You can fine-tune the way each element works by using a pop-up Property Inspector palette, which changes content and layout according to the item selected. It's also possible to add DHTML effects here, such as sliding text in from the side or creating a scrolling banner - all without any programming. You can change formatting and, if you fancy a bit of programming, insert chunks of HTML before or after the tag, or even inside the text of the tag.

For the beginner, there's a New Site Wizard that helps you create websites by offering a simple layout, a style for the buttons and graphics, and finally leaving you to populate the pages with content. You can choose the types of page created based on a business layout type, such as products, services or general, and then edit the sections of the pre-formatted pages that result.

Online services

On first loading, Fusion opens in the Services home page mode. From here, you can access a work-in-progress list of sites and pages recently opened, or go online to take advantage of a range of integrated services. Website Pros now owns NetObjects and specialises in value-added Web Services. As you might expect, you can now insert Website Pros' page hit counters, site searches, polls and guest books from a purpose-built toolbar. FrontPage offers similar 'bots', but Fusion components don't require

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any special server-side extensions to work. Only a few of these services are free, however: most require a small monthly or annual fee.

One service new to NetObjects Fusion 7 is an e-commerce add-in from BitMotion that uses the PayPal payment services provider. Although it's free to include 'buy now' buttons on your web pages, you'll need to subscribe to the service to process credit card payments online.

As well as the various page-design views, you can manage your entire site in the Site view, adding, dragging and dropping pages where you need them. You create and manage pages in a tree-like display, with Fusion updating navigation links, page names and other details automatically as you go.

While you're busy importing, dragging and dropping or otherwise adding external files, images and links to your site, Fusion keeps track of all this in the Asset Manager. As part of this job, some of the external files may be copied into the Fusion 'user sites' folders for safekeeping and others might stay where you want them on your system. You can use the Asset Manager to manage all these links and resources at any time in the future, and keep all the web pages that reference them up to date. So if you change the name of a file or modify a link from here, the software automatically updates all the references throughout the site.

A sense of style

Getting a tasteful and attractive design for your site is easy if you have years of design school experience to fall back on, but the rest of us aren't aesthetics whizz-kids. So, like most web-design packages, Fusion offers a combination of site templates and design layouts to create your site. There are hundreds to choose from, plus more on the website to download for free. Each site style can be customised, allowing you to change all attributes, including the overall colour scheme, buttons and graphics used, and the font type and size.

If you're asking Fusion to output HTML using CSS rules, editing text styles will effectively be like using a sophisticated CSS editor. For example, you can choose to update the style on disk for all sites that use it, or just the style for that site, for that page or even just for that element. Get this wrong and it takes hours to work out why your style changes aren't having any effect, but get it right and it's an exceptionally powerful tool.

Like FrontPage, you also use master borders that repeat anything placed across the entire site or a section of the site automatically, which makes creating navigation bars and banners a breeze. You're able to create your own master borders where required and use these to achieve particular effects, such as alterations to the navigational structure, depending on where you are in the site.

The navigation bars themselves can be created automatically, based on your site's layout, so when you change the site's structure, your navigation changes to match. It's also possible to edit the structure of the navigation bar specifically to add anything from pages in other sites to external links or files. New to version 7 are JavaScript pop-out menus. You simply tick the option and your navigation bar neatly displays a tree structure when the mouse hovers over it - very cool and, again, no programming involved.

Other new bits include a really useful global spell checker, plus a site-navigation palette you can use to quickly get from one page to another while editing. Creating links within your site has also been made much easier with a completely redesigned Link tool. You're able to create all your links both inside your site and externally by browsing and picking from a list. Plus, you can now use an option to create windows that pop up in a new browser instance, or redirect the link to arrive within a specific frame.

For the digital photographer, the new Photo Gallery tools should prove a great deal of fun. Fusion just needs to know where the images are and then it creates an online album, complete with thumbnail browsing pages. You can choose from various layouts and styles, optimise images for fast downloading and select a variety of custom-designed frames.

NetObjects Fusion 7 takes the goalposts set by the likes of FrontPage and moves them much nearer to those set by Dreamweaver. You don't get built-in application development to the extent of Adobe GoLive 6, but there are full facilities for accessing data objects and inserting components to control ASP, ColdFusion and other data-driven technologies. However, Fusion 7 scores points for making powerful web design truly accessible without programming, from precise placement of objects to dialog-based management of Flash and Java applet insertion.

Developers will appreciate the way you can now save an entire site or a single page as a template on which to base another site or page, the access to HTML from within objects and seamless CSS control. Other users will like the design interface and the way you can place objects where you like on screen, as well as the fact that they display correctly in both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer just as you intended. For those who don't like to spend all day playing with HTML tags, but do want pixel-perfect design, NetObjects Fusion 7 is the state of the art.