Labs

When you first use Fusion's step-by-step wizard to create your site, you simply specify which elements on the home page, such as headers, should be reproduced on all other pages. Each time you edit one of these elements, on any page, you can decide if you want your changes to apply to just that page, or to the entire site.

It includes several templates, but the Site Wizard provides the easiest way for beginners to get started. This allows the user to select which pages they want for their Web site (for example, do you want a contact page?), a design and a colour scheme from a list. The results of the Site Wizard are smart

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and professional-looking, and it's simple to publish the finished site to the Internet or save it on your PC or network for testing.

Most impressive of all are the options NetObjects provides for making an online shop. The software can guide you through setting up an account with several online payment schemes, including PayPal. You then list the items you want to sell, and tell the program the options you want to appear next to each. With a single mouse-click, Fusion creates an entire catalogue using the items you listed. For anyone who has lots of things to sell online this will save loads of time.

But this simplicity doesn't mean NetObjects Fusion has been 'dumbed down': you can edit HTML code as you work. You can't have the code always open, though. You have to generate a preview each time you want to change the HTML. This makes it difficult to edit code as you work. Usefully, Fusion hides important code that you don't want to edit by accident (the HTML that defines the dimensions of a table, say).

NetObjects Fusion is easy to use, flexible, creates good-looking sites and its catalogue function is a cracking feature. It easily deserves both a Recommended and a Best for Your Business award.