FastSite Millennium Edition

As Lotus leans more towards a Web-centric way of thinking with SSME, a Web site creation tool becomes a natural inclusion. After all, there's little point setting up HTML documents for team review if you don't have the necessary applications and skills to get those documents onto a server.

Arguably, it's easy to create a Web site without the most sophisticated tools. Anyone with any experience of producing a Web site will tell you that the major problem is keeping the whole thing coherent. Even assuming that you manage to work out a style for the entire site or specific portions of it the problems aren't over. You still have to maintain that overall look, along with a search index and all those links. FastSite is the Lotus way of solving these problems.

If you already know Freelance, the FastSite approach will come as no surprise. To start a Web site you use a multistep Wizard, which first asks you what you'd like to call your Web site and where you'd like it stored. This is simpler than creating a Web site raw because the location is a staging location, where you store your work in progress - not the final location used to generate links within the pages.

The next step of the Wizard gives you a choice of site style - a set of pre-designed standard Web pages with a fixed division of the page into navigation controls and content. After this you can select any files you want to include in your site and finally click on the Done button. If you've ever created a Web site before, you might think that the files you include would have to be HTML or Web pages. In fact, you can include files from any SmartSuite app or Microsoft Word, if you have a copy installed. The files are listed in a hierarchical display and to view them as Web pages you have to ask FastSite to convert them. This is the only way of creating Web page content. You use WordPro to create pages with text and graphics, 1-2-3 to create pages with tables and graphics, and Freelance to create presentation pages and so on. If you're familiar with other Web page creation programs this might take a little getting used to but it makes good sense. Instead of working with a special HTML editor you use the apps you already work with.

When FastSite creates a Web site for you it gives you a single home page with links to any files you included. What you can't do is add links within the files. To create structure you can insert sections. Each section page behaves like a home page and displays links to all the files that are positioned below it in the hierarchy. To change where links are displayed you simply drag files to the appropriate point in the hierarchy. So if you have a home page, two sections - s1 and s2, and three files f1,f2 and f3 - you could create links on the home page to the sections by dragging the sections immediately below the home page. If you drag f1 and f2 to be below s1 it would display links to these pages, and if f3 was below s2 it would display a single link to f3.

You can see that the hierarchy displays the default link structure which is, of course, a tree. If you want to provide a link to some part of the site that isn't directly below a section page you have to insert a link object into the hierarchy. You can also use a link object to provide a link to an external URL. If you make any changes to files or links you will have to reconvert before you can preview the result, but a 'Convert out of date files' option makes refreshing the preview easy.

Once you've built content and the link structure you can publish the result. This involves both generating the HTML files needed and the URLs appropriate for the site. This approach makes moving a Web site very easy. If you want to publish the site to a new server all the URLs will be changed to reflect the new location. You can publish to any standard Internet server, to a file server or to a Domino server. Publishing to a file server allows the creation of disk-based copies of the Web site - which could also be used on a CD-ROM. Publishing to a Domino database allows the automatic construction of search indexes and all those other fiddly bits. Web pages can be published in standard HTML or JDoc - that is, HTML plus Java applets - and you can opt to provide the user an Explorer-style navigation frame.