NetObjects Fusion 7

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.