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 NEWSFusion 5.0 creates sites faster By Andre Kvitka, For InfoWorld Test Center December 6, 1999 AIMED AT businesses that want to get a Web site up and running yesterday, NetObjects Fusion has always been an easy-to-use and flexible tool, and the Fusion 5.0 beta that I tested for this review is no exception. Fusion doesn't allow you to build dynamic Web sites based on Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology, as does Macromedia's Drumbeat, and graphically oriented Web designers will prefer tools such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver. But only Microsoft FrontPage rivals Fusion's capability to create spiffy Web sites very quickly and easily plug in more powerful capabilities -- such as ASP-based dynamic Web pages or Internet commerce services -- later. And I have always considered Fusion to be much easier to learn than FrontPage, resulting in great Web sites being developed quicker.
To accommodate these additions, the interface has undergone a slight face-lift. Fusion's main development area now has three tabs, with each representing a specific view. The first tab gives you the Page View, where you can do most of your page layout and design work by dragging and dropping page elements into place. The second tab takes you to the new internal HTML editor. By switching from Page View to the HTML editor, I was able to view the code that Fusion generated for the page I was developing and add my own tags and scripts. The third tab lets you quickly preview the page being designed as it will be seen in the Internet Explorer Web browser. Of course, previewing pages in an external browser is still an option. One of the things that Fusion has always done well is site structuring and maintenance. The site-structure view displays individual pages in relation to the rest of the site. Adding pages or moving them is just a matter of dragging and dropping. New to version 5.0 is the capability to copy and paste entire pages or even sections of the site. This enhancement will save designers a great deal of time. The product has other important enhancements. For example, the HTML import feature has been improved dramatically. Importing an existing site into previous versions of Fusion often resulted in missing graphics or a crippled site structure, but importing into Fusion 5.0 proved to be a little faster and much cleaner. I imported a complex site with more than 300 pages and was impressed with the results. Fusion 5.0 also adds more ready-to-use site styles. FTP enhancements include multithreaded publishing, which allowed me to publish my site to my Web server in the background while I continued to work in the application. Other significant enhancements include a better toolbox for customizing tables, the capability to format multiple objects at once, and much better control over navigation bars. For example, I was able to associate each navigation button of a navigation bar with any internal or external link. I was extremely happy to see the addition of full support for Cascading Style Sheets, which allowed me to quickly create consistent-looking text throughout the site. In addition to new features and tweaks, Fusion 5.0 really makes an effort to help small to midsize businesses with the entire process of planning, building, and marketing a Web site. A new Online button on the main toolbar launches the internal browser and takes the user to a tutorial that explains site-building concepts and provides links to other useful data. For example, to learn more about enabling my new Web site with electronic-commerce tools, I simply went to the Grow section of the planner, where I found relevant information with links to e-commerce tools. If you need to plan, build, and maintain a Web site that can easily be e-commerce-enabled, then Fusion 5.0 is the answer. Fusion 5.0 is a mature Web-site design tool that allows novices and experts alike to create visually appealing and highly functional Web sites. And when the time comes to add more functionality, Fusion's standards-based Java API simplifies the process, with connectors for deploying dynamic Web pages, multimedia, and e-commerce services. Andre Kvitka (akvitka@flashcom.net ) is an independent consultant who has been reviewing products for more than 10 years.
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