"The Fastest, easiest way to build business Web sites" is the claim made by NetObjects regarding the latest version of their Fusion 4.0 Web design application. After running Fusion through the paces of building a few demo (and one live) small business sites, I'd have to agree with the fact that it is certainly fast, relatively easy, and a good way to get a small business on the Web. Fusion, through a clever design implementation, and simplified integration with e-commerce services, is definitely a good bet for getting started on the Web.
June 12, 1999
Documentation
Fusion comes with a nice getting-started guide including a tear-out cheat sheet, along with a 10-minute site development handbook. The documentation is very good in all aspects but one - installation. Whereas most product documentation begins with a section on installation, you'll find none of that here. Instead, you're immediately thrown into how to build a Web site quickly. This is a problem, since, as I learned, there are some tools (like the ASP and iCat connectors) that don't install by default, and you find yourself digging around the CD installer later to get them going. Nowhere is it mentioned in the manual that you need to install these separately, which led to a minor bit of frustration on my part.
Installation is straightforward once you install the CD-ROM into your Windows 9x/NT PC. The now-ubiquitous autorun feature kicks in, throwing you into the install options. It's very simple, but as I've mentioned, there's no note made that you'll need to install the "add-on's" from another sub-section of the installer to use the ASP and iCat connectors. Rather annoying to say the least.
The Environment - Something Old, Something New for Many
Fusion's interface is much like the standard programming environment you see currently. It's a hybrid of Visual Basic's "form and toolbar" interface, and Adobe's Pagemaker interface. If you're cringing at the thought of this, fear not - the Fusion interface is nowhere near as cluttered nor as complicated as the others.
Upon launching Fusion, you're greeted with the site wizard, prompting you to either create from scratch, import a site, or use a site template wizard. I found the wizards were pretty comprehensive, but the import function was fairly horrid. Any time I brought in a site with more than 20 pages, it took forever and a day to import it. On top of that, it mangled most of the imported work, forcing me to hand edit everything to bring it to a usable state. During one import of a combination ASP- and HTML-based site, Fusion continually choked. The same site imported into Drumbeat 2000 without a hitch.
The next step involves designing the site's layout. Many editors prefer to throw you directly into page design, whereas Fusion asks that you first design your site map. The site editor has two formats, a flowchart style view and an outline view. Either works well, though I find myself using the flowchart view for most work, and only referring to the outline when I need to see what pages I have yet to publish/upload. While in the site layout editor, you can choose from a variety of site styles (akin to themes in most other applications), publish your pages to a Web server, preview pages and more.
Once you're actually editing, life becomes much simpler. The page layouts are divided into Master Borders, which are elements that carry over into all pages (generally your site navigation toolbars) and the Layout, which contains the custom elements for individual pages. To be honest, the Master Border function bordered (excuse the pun) on giving me a headache. First and foremost, you have to remember that anything placed in the master border carries over to all pages within the site. In my case, I had built a navigation toolbar that controlled everything directly below it. Then, one level below, a single page had its own child pages. Whenever I modified the navigation toolbar on this one page to handle only its children, all the other pages in the site swapped out their navigation toolbar for this one. The workaround I found was to turn off the master border function (and lose some of its benefits) and drop my navigation toolbar into the standard page layouts. It works well, but it was disappointing to have to find a workaround to what was supposed to be a feature.
Within the Fusion environment, raw HTML is forsaken in favor of pixel-precise layout capabilities. The page editor feels more like a professional desktop publishing tool (Pagemaker, Quark, etc.) than a standard drag-and-drop HTML editor (FrontPage, HotDog Pro, and the like). This can be confusing to the more seasoned developer looking for the old-school balance of WYSIWYG tools and raw code tools. Thankfully, at any time you can insert good-old fashioned raw HTML into a page through a pop-up menu. This is really handy since there are some tags (like the line break " ") which are a pain to try to insert from the toolbars. I found myself just keying in any HTML element I didn't have the patience to look up in the menus.
The page editor does not use HTML, but a proprietary code format that is processed into HTML when the pages are published. Unlike most WYSIWYG packages, Fusion's generated HTML is precise, legal, and highly accurate. Rarely will you find a design element such as an image misaligned or improperly placed. While it would seem that this type of precision HTML would require a higher-end browser on the client, this is not the case. When publishing documents, you are presented with browser compatibility options, which force generated HTML into compliance with just about any class of browser you wish, from "Generic browsers" to "Internet Explorer 4.0 and better." In testing Netscape, Internet Explorer, and the Opera Browser, this compatibility held truer than in most other packages I've used.
Previewing pages, while very simple, can be time-consuming for large sites. During the preview process, the Fusion document format is converted to HTML, then loaded into the browser of your choice. I found that with standard HTML, preview worked fine, but when using ASP-based pages, the preview always failed, and the only way of viewing your finished product was to publish the pages to your Web server. The failure to preview ASP pages is not a distinct problem of Fusion, but one I've found in many packages, and so I don't consider this a strike against the product.
Publishing, much like previewing, is kept to a few simple steps. Once you've configured the publishing settings, a button-click launches the publisher utility, which converts your pages to HTML, creates a directory structure, and moves them to the Web server of your choice. After publishing, the pages automatically preview in your browser, which has one distinct flaw: ASP publishing. Once published on my local machine (using Personal Web Server for Win95/98) any ASP code failed. After some digging, I found that the preview function was not loading the pages as an actual URL (for ex. http://localhost/page1.asp) but rather as a simple local file ( "C:\program files\netobjects\preview\page1.asp") even though I had set the proper URLs during configuration. It was interesting to find that the publisher had actually moved copies of the site to the appropriate directories on my Web server, but wasn't calling them when previewing.
Fusion comes pre-packaged with two tools to help fledgling e-commerce developers. The first, the iCat Commerce Connector, is useful for building an online store. The iCat service, for those who've never heard of it, is an online service that provides all the back-end e-commerce support to get a small business going. The iCat Connector comes as a standard component of Fusion and simply allows you to plug your iCat store into your pages.
The second tool is the Microsoft ASP connector. For those sites that need database connectivity, and are running an ODBC-compliant database, the ASP Connector makes creating dynamic, database-generated pages a snap. As with the rest of Fusion, advanced features are sacrificed in favor of ease-of-use, so you should not expect the ASP development tools you would see with Visual InterDev or Drumbeat 2000.
Summing It Up
NetObjects Fusion is definitely targeted to the novice designer, whether a small business looking to go online, or a page designer looking for a quick and accurate layout tool. The strength of Fusion is pure ease, sacrificing some of the advanced code editing features experienced developers are accustomed to. For those needing to edit raw HTML, Fusion (thankfully) comes with a copy of Allaire's HomeSite editor. Has anyone else noticed that every Web site kit that's missing a pure HTML editor is slapping on a gratis copy of HomeSite?
Overall, if you need to get online quickly, or are more of a designer than a developer, Fusion is definitely worth purchasing. If you're looking more towards the development end of site building, you're better off with something like Microsoft's Visual InterDev (for advanced users) or Elemental Software's Drumbeat 2000 (for intermediate users).
