Netobjects Fusion 7.5

More structured than other packages, its ease of use is appealing.

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Price: £135.95

Manufacturer: Netobjects

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Pros:

Integrated shopping system builds stores rapidly.

Cons:
Overly structured design approach may not appeal to everyone.

Verdict:
Great for structured sites. The ecommerce options make it amazingly simple to sell online. The rigid approach, however, may put off hardcore web coders and creative minds.

Nigel Whitfield, Personal Computer World 10 Dec 2003

Netobjects Fusion is a long-established website-creation package. The new release, version 7.5, adds some useful features that will be appreciated by both newcomers and experienced users alike.

Compared with, say, Dreamweaver, Fusion takes a different approach to constructing websites. With a traditional web editor, you can pop in your links willy nilly. And while there's some automatic updating if you move pages around, the general outline of the site is up to you.

Fusion has always taken a more structured approach. It's based on a sort of family tree, which is initially set up by a simple wizard, depending on whether you want a personal or business website. You can add or remove pages at will, and drag them around to a different branch of the tree.

Fusion has always created all the buttons and banners you need, based on page titles, automatically. Just pick a style from an extensive gallery, which offers instant downloads from elsewhere on the net, and your site's look and feel changes almost instantly. It's a neat trick that Frontpage now offers too, but not as well, in our opinion. Click to publish or preview and you'll see a site with professional-looking graphics, which can be a boon for anyone who isn't naturally creative.

As well as the improved styles gallery, the new version has a better photo gallery editor that lets you add images to your site easily - though fine-tuning the positioning of individual images is a bit fiddly. Drag an image on one sub page and you'll find you've moved the ones on other pages too.

Nevertheless, it's a quick and easy way to add large numbers of photos and thumbnails to your website. You can also add objects such as Quicktime, Windows Media and Flash to your site easily by drawing a container for them and picking the object to be included. Additional script can also be inserted and it's best to do that in the graphical view. While there is an HTML view of your page, it shows a hierarchical tree that novices will find confusing, and the Netobjects tags, which are part of the automatic page generation, make it hard to see what should go where. It's simple enough to add, for instance, PHP code fragments, but Fusion lacks the full integration with such systems that's offered by Dreamweaver or Go Live. If you want to do a hardcore coding task, you'd be better off with one of those solutions.

For small businesses, Fusion integrates options such as signing up with web hosting, but one of the most important new features is the integration with ecommerce solutions. There have, in the past, been add-ins that allow some shopping carts to be used easily with Fusion, but now there's a choice of four different ones built right in.

To create a shop, just click on the shopping cart icon at the left of the screen and draw a box with the cursor. You're then walked through a choice of systems, including an email forms-based shop, one using Paypal and options with online credit card processing.

When you've chosen your shop and filled in the necessary details for payment, you simply enter product details into a catalogue properties editor, which allows you to add pictures, specify weight and packing information, along with titles, brief and long descriptions. Click done and your shop pages are generated automatically - no programming, no fuss. You'll need to upload them to a server to test them, but setting up a publishing option for a site is simple. It took us just a few minutes to create a simple shop with two products using Paypal for a basket system. Although it's not the slickest look around - a visitor's basket will pop up in a new window from Paypal - it does show how incredibly easy Fusion makes it to sell online. It's one of the easiest ways we've seen this done.

If, like many businesses, your website is fairly well structured, and you want to sell online with minimum effort, and without spending hours creating buttons and banners, Netobjects Fusion will give you a professional-looking, ecommerce-enabled site in a very short time. It is well worth a look.

Contact: Netobjects
www.netojects.co.uk

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