NetObjects Fusion 7

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 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.