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A great tool for building and managing Web sites.by Fred Katt The co-founder of NetObjects is Clement Mok, former Apple graphic design guru. With Fusion, Monk has developed a Web authoring application aimed at small and medium-sized businesses that want to build Web sites which can be updated frequently, and that need a minimum of 15 to 20 HTML pages. While aimed at the do-it-yourself market, Fusion offers an integrated package of Web-site creation and management tools that will also meet the needs of Webmasters. It allows designers to lay out moderately sophisticated Web sites without having to bother with the underlying Web-page description in HTML. This is a great time saver to the Webmaster. NetObjects Fusion sets the pace for new Web authoring products with its page-layout approach to page and site creation. Unlike the word processor-like approach, Fusion's approach lets the Webmaster align and arrange page components with accuracy down to the pixel. Fusion ultimately produces standards-compliant full HTML 3.2 pages, and can be viewed only by the latest and most up-to-date browsers, such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Fusion integrates five main tools: a visual structure editor, page layout and drawing program, style manager, site assets manager, and HTML publisher. Fusion's SiteStructure Editor lets you build pages (and relationships) using either a hierarchical or visual editor. You can insert pre-made, predefined sites or single page templates, then restructure your site by dragging and dropping pages in the editor, which maintains the hierarchies. Fusion encourages experimentation: Prototyped pages needn't appear in the final site. Pages are laid out with the PageDraw tool. Fusion automatically generates a header (for a banner and navigation buttons) and footer (for text hyperlinks), as well as a main body where you can precisely place shapes, tables, audio and video files, data lists, fields and form elements. Though you can't edit the HTML directly (the pages are generated using standard, but highly complex, HTML tables), PageDraw has a floating palette of tools: selection, zoom, text and image objects, tables, forms, Java applets, ActiveX controls, Macromedia Shockwave movies, drawing shapes, and data objects. There is also support for creating image maps. Fusion's SiteStyle Manager offers various looks for banners, buttons, backgrounds, data list icons and link text colors. Unlike the dry-looking objects you generally find in clip-art libraries, these styles are jazzy attention-grabbers. Styles offer consistency, but they're used in a unique way. Included with Fusion are almost 50 predefined SiteStyles. All are professionally designed, and are ideal for intranet sites and Internet sites that don't require a unique look. A classy-looking site can be whipped up in a matter of hours. The SiteAssets view lets you centrally manage your Web site resources. Change a bitmap here, and the program perpetuates the change throughout your site. SitePublish Manager: Fusion keeps all HTML behind the scenes, so the user must publish the site before moving it to a staging or production server. Fusion creates HTML files for each page in the site and moves them to a specified Web server directory. A built-in File Transfer Protocol capability transfers files to remote servers. A few SitePublish settings specialize the files for different kinds of Web servers. One setting publishes a text-only version of the site, doing this by merely skipping the images and displaying only the text. When Fusion generates your site, it merges the selected style and the appropriate text to generate all the bitmaps needed on every page. For example, if your page is called Marketing Department, Fusion creates a custom banner in your selected style with the words Marketing Department centered within the bitmap. Buttons that direct you to other pages are a combination of smaller buttons in the same style and each page's name. Change the name, and Fusion automatically generates new buttons. You can also generate text-only versions of your site or "low-bandwidth" editions that reduce GIFs to four colors and JPEG images by 50 percent. Site generation is very fast, given everything that Fusion does to create it. I generated a mythical 25-page Web site in less than fifteen minutes. Fusion's data objects are linked to a database that is either internal to Fusion, or accessible through an Open Database Connectivity driver. The data-list object creates a sorted, filtered list of database records according to your criteria. The list is formatted in the HTML bullet style, with either standard HTML bullets or a bullet image you specify. Each record in the data list can be automatically linked to an individual page that Fusion generates. These pages, which NetObjects calls stacked pages, display information from each record and follow a master format. One slight drawback is that the data-objects functions in Fusion are read-only. You can't update or change database records from within a Web page. Also, the data is accessed only when the site is published in Fusion, so pages aren't dynamic. However, the data can be updated by republishing the site. Many sites, especially corporate intranet sites, rely on products like Cold Fusion, from Allaire Corporation of Cambridge, Mass., or on Microsoft's Internet Database Connector, to populate Web pages with up-to-the-minute data. If your site requires live database queries embedded in pages, then NetObjects Fusion probably is not for you. But if your site requires updates on a nightly or weekly basis (instead of hourly, or by the minute), Fusion will do just fine. Fusion is unlike any other Web tool you've seen. It's 'easy-to-build" knockout pages can be up and running in a matter of hours. NetObjects Fusion runs without proprietary extensions and is compatible with all standard browsers and servers. A version of Fusion is immediately available for download, at (http://www.netobjects.com/). While visiting the NetObjects web site I became aware of this new announcement and have included it here. NetObjects has now introduced NetObjects Fusion 2.0. With over 100 new features and improvements and 25 new SiteStyles. Key New Features include: SiteImport: The new SiteImport feature now lets you import an existing site and enhance it, using all of the visual power of NetObjects Fusion 2.0. This lets you leverage the investment in your Web site, and reduce the effort and cost of updating your site over time. You can import a local site or grab a site off the Web, including all of its assets. The SiteImport feature also lets you import an entire site or selected portions of a site. MasterBorders: NetObjects Fusion 2.0 brings you another first, MasterBorders: a revolutionary new concept for Web sites and Web pages. MasterBorders provide borders around your page layout for you to place elements that automatically appear on all pages of your Web site, such as navigational controls, company logo or calls-to-action. AutoFrames are a new breakthrough that provide the easiest way to create a frames-based Web site. Unlike other products that require you to manually set up frames on a page-by-page basis, AutoFrames let you convert, at the click of a button, any MasterBorder into a frame. NetObjects Fusion 2.0 ships with a number of components including:
With this new version, Fusion just keeps getting better and better. |
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