Product Reviews

Before you attempt to design your own Web site, it's important to pick a package that's suited to the kind of site you want to create. If you just want to create an online guide to your hobby, you can get suitable software for as little as £40. But spend a bit more and you'll get a package like NetObjects Fusion 7 that has extra features designed to make it easy to create and maintain small business sites as well.

Fusion's price pitches it squarely against the likes of Microsoft FrontPage (reviewed Computer Buyer June 2002 issue). On paper, at least, it offers a similar set of features. We're talking powerful site management, extensive use of templates to ensure consistency of design between pages, and support for dynamically-generated pages for things like product catalogues.

Fusion's excellent interface makes it very easy to get started - the software first opens into the Online screen that contains links to online resources, as well as shortcuts to tasks like creating a new site from scratch. Icons for other screens, such as Site, Page and Style, are arranged along the top of the screen.

One of the biggest headaches when designing a site is

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working out how users should navigate to the information they need, and Fusion comes up trumps in this department. The Site screen contains a tree view of your site with the home page at its 'root'. When you select the home page and add a new page called 'Products' for example, the navigation bar on the home page is updated to include your new page. Add a new page again 'below' this page ('Lawnmowers', for instance), and the navigation bar now has Products at the top level with Lawnmowers on a sub menu. While other packages do this kind of thing too, Fusion makes it a lot clearer than most.

Another feature that's shared by most other packages is the ability to use templates that are applied across an entire site. Fusion comes with a very good set of pre-defined templates, with thankfully few of the garish efforts that often come with cheaper software. Of course, you'll often want to create your own templates from scratch, and Fusion comes with plenty of flexibility in this department, although this can be slightly confusing with the sheer variety of options available. Still, the manuals are very good, and there's plenty of help available on adapting pages from the default styles.

If you're running a business it's extremely important to keep your Web site up to date, and Fusion makes this very easy by allowing you to use data either stored in the pages themselves or from an external source such as a database. It makes generating pages from such databases and uploading them to your site a painless operation.

In terms of raw features, Fusion doesn't do anything unique. But its user interface is second to none and it's well worth paying a bit extra for a piece of software that'll have you knocking up decent-looking sites in no time.