NetObjects Fusion Essentials
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This web site was created using NetObjects Fusion Essentials, which is free. To get a registration key you just need to register your contact details online. Version 7 has now been discontinued, and NOF Essentials is version 7.5. It seems to have all of the same features as version 7, and a few unspecified bug fixes and improvements. I had no trouble opening sites produced in version 7, and the interface is 100% familiar to me.

Contents

  1. Key Features
  2. Performance
  3. Ease of Use
  4. Standard Tools
  5. Advanced Tools
  6. Conclusions

Key Features

  1. The WYSIWYG Page Design mode will be familiar to anyone who uses a Desktop Publishing program. Page elements such as text frames, tables, navigation bars, and graphics can be laid out freely with the mouse. Text can wrap around graphics. Text styles maintain a consistent look throughout the site.
  2. A wide range of predefined Site Styles give you a quick start to design attractive pages. Navigation bars, banners, buttons, and page backgrounds can be modified in the style-sheet to create custom site styles.
  3. The Site Structure mode makes it easy to rearrange pages. View your web site as an outline or as a hierarchical family tree. Move pages with their children and grandchildren by drag and drop. Navigation bars are updated automatically.
    Site Structure View
  4. Page Preview mode to see how your site will look in different browsers.
  5. HTML Source mode for those who want to look under the bonnet. Beginners don’t need to concern themselves with HTML coding. NetObjects Fusion creates all of the code for you when the site is published, but you can edit the code and insert HTML code snippets if you wish.
  6. Asset Management. Verify links and check for missing assets to quickly fix broken links and other problems.
  7. Publish Site using different profiles, for example, publish to your local drive, or to different web servers. Publish the entire site, the current page and its descendants, or the current page only.
  8. Import HTML: If you are a first-time user of NOF migrating from another program, you can import your old web sites. I found that results were usable, but results will depend very much on the original site that you’re importing.

Performance

My main web site is currently 270 pages, and still growing. The pages are mostly text, but some contain an entire book. The file size on disk is 37 Mbytes, yet to save the site takes only one second, and to load it takes about seven seconds. For comparison, WebPlus X2 takes about 30 seconds to load the same site and over a minute to save it.

Ease of Use

Navigating around a large site is easy by using the cursor keys — Control Left/Right to move to the previous/next sibling page, Control up to move to the parent page, and Control down to move to the first child page. The site navigator palette shows the site tree structure for navigation with a double-click of the mouse.

Resizing a page horizontally or vertically is easy — just drag the margin guides on the rulers or resize page elements and the margins will adjust to fit. No need to enter values in dialogue boxes, although you can if you wish.

The application options can be set to open the last edited site at the last viewed page so you can resume work straight away where you left off last time.

Standard Tools

  1. Select: Select page elements for moving and resizing
  2. Zoom: Zoom in to 125, 150, or 200% or zoom out to 75, 50, or 25% with Alter
  3. Text: Create text frames
  4. Tables: Layout is often easier to control if you use tables. Tables can have borders, backgrounds, and margins
  5. Graphics: Insert images (PNG, GIF, JPG, and PCX) PCX will be converted to GIF or JPG
  6. Hotspots: Add hotspots of different shapes to images, that link to other pages
  7. Links: Link to a specific site page, a parent, child, or sibling page, an external web site, or a file
  8. Anchors: Set a target at a specific point on the page for links
  9. Navigation Bars: Vertical or Horizontal navigation bars are easy to customise. The use the primary or secondary buttons used by the site style, or text. Custom navigation bars can include any selected site pages.
  10. Forms: These can contain buttons, check-boxes, radio buttons, edit fields, and combination boxes.
  11. Shapes: Draw Rectangles, Ellipses, Polygons, and lines. Add text to shapes.
  12. Rules: Horizontal rules or graphic rules as defined in the site style

Advanced Tools

These include external services, photo galleries, e-commerce catalogues, flash, quick time, activex controls, plug-ins, data list, HTML codes, and external HTML. I have never used any of them, so I cannot comment.

Conclusions

The only other programs I have used for web page design are PagePlus and WebPlus X2, or earlier version of NOF. My first experience was with NOF 2.02, then NOF MX (ver 4.0), NOF 7, and the trial version of NOF 10. In my view, NetObjects Fusion Essentials is the ideal program for beginners to web design. Site Styles make it easy to create a good-looking site with a minimum of effort. Many advanced features are available, but the beginner can easily use to learn the basic tools. I have never bothered to go beyond the basics. For my rich content sites, which are mostly text, speed and ease of use are the main points. Stability is very good too, but automatic backup and recovery will make sure that you never lose more than a few minutes’ worth of work if you do experience a program crash or power failure.

Cons

Page display when zooming in is not 100% reliable; Unicode support is minimal, e.g. words like nibbāna containing Extended Latin characters cannot be added to the dictionary; the keyboard cannot be customised, and there is no Autocorrect apart from Smart Quotes, but that’s not a lot to complain about.