Product Reviews

NetObjects Fusion is a web-design package aimed at small business users who know nothing about HTML. It allows you to design a website visually, rather than typing in code, and upload it to a web server without the need for any other software. A useful wizard helps you to create a simple site in less than a minute. After editing the text on each page and inserting relevant images into the areas marked with placeholders, you'll have a functional website ready in no time.

We've always been impressed by a few of Fusion's features, and its E-commerce system in particular. This integrates with PayPal or the online shop facility provided by 1&1 UK, and allows you to create a simple catalogue of products quickly. If you want to sell only a handful of products, it's a great way of doing business online without any complicated software to set up. If you do want to build something more complicated, you can use the database connection facilities. Fusion can create dynamic webpages with database content using ASP, PHP and ASP.NET, but we discovered that entering one of the database settings incorrectly could cause the software to hang when your website is published.

Version 10 of Fusion has a few interesting

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new features. The Flash photo album tool allows you to create an interactive photo album. With one large picture and thumbnails that allow users to select the image that they wish to view, it's a simple way to put a few pictures online. Fusion's own interface has been overhauled as well. When you start the application, you're presented with a start page that's packed with all the design cliches of a web 2.0f site, namely tabs, large sans-serif fonts and reflective shadows. The layout of Fusion's toolbars is now easy to customise, so you can rearrange everything to suit the way you work.

Unfortunately, there are many areas in which Fusion feels decidedly outdated. Its templates don't appear to have changed significantly since the last version, and none looks as modern as Fusion's own start page. We were particularly disappointed that this latest version still exports pages in HTML 4.01 transitional, a standard first introduced in 1999. There's no facility to produce pages written in the more modern XHTML. The pages Fusion produces validate as correct HTML 4.01 transitional, but the CSS style sheets included errors and failed to validate. Some CSS formatting didn't display properly in FireFox. When we checked the browser-compatibility settings we were amazed to see that they included compatibility options for Netscape Navigator 4.x and Internet Explorer 4. Netscape 4 was a popular browser in the late 1990s, but is now horrendously out of date.

Overall, Fusion 10 disappointed us. Its new Flash photo album feature is handy and the E-commerce tool is as good as ever, but the software and the pages it creates feel stuck in the past. It's still easy to use, but we recommend using software that enables you to create pages using more modern technologies such as valid XHTML and CSS.