NetObjects Fusion MX

by Mike Yoshikawa, LACS

When a company encloses extra material and assigns a special representative to help make its product easier to review, I get worried. It is especially worrisome when that material weighs as much as the product’s manual. It raises the question, "Does the company consider reviewers to be that much more important than regular users or does the company have that little faith in its product and its manual?"

I have had some experience creating simple web pages. Because of lack of time and a little laziness, I had quit learning HTML. I could only post pictures and write some simple text. When it came to designing slightly more complex web pages, I cheated and used web page design software. My first experience was with Adobe Page Mill for Macintosh in 1995. I used it to help create a bare-bones website. To my knowledge, it was never put online and viewed by a single member of the public. I did learn one important fact at the time, though. Even though Macintosh had the ability to use long file names, web page browsers did not recognize file names with spaces. Amazingly, that fact was never mentioned in the manuals. Furthermore, the program was not capable of doing tables or building a catalog. The bottom line was that version of Adobe Page Mill was great for building personal web pages but less suited for business.

I also created a few web pages as a part of a demonstration of WordPerfect Office’s abilities. Due to time constraints, the pages tended to be quite bland. I also tried the same thing with Microsoft Office 97. I was disappointed that I could not convert a nice PowerPoint project into a web page. I was, however, able to create tables and a basic catalog, but I could not integrate other applications such as a shopping cart.

Ultimately, my goal was to create a business web site that would do what any good business web site would do: make money. This web site would do so by selling things. Those who have kept up with Internet trends know that there is only so much money that can be made through the sale of advertising space, so instead of competing with somewhat larger entities such as Yahoo, I was better off offering something tangible to draw visitors and create a cash flow. Actually, I had no inventory myself, but a collector I met had to liquidate over five thousand items and did not want to deal with the limitations of ebay or other auction sites.

When I heard the description for NetObjects Fusion MX, I thought that it would fit our needs quite nicely. After all, the company said that they designed this application with businesses of all sizes in mind. I was a little overly optimistic, but there was money involved. I decided to review the product.

Straightforward. Most companies have this part down pretty well, and NetObjects is no exception. I checked to see if my computer met the system requirements. The program requires a Pentium 133 or better, at least 32 MB of RAM, 50 MB of free hard drive space to install, and 60 MB to use for virtual memory. You also need Windows (not Linux) and Internet access with TCP/IP. The product is on a CD-ROM, and you need a mouse or other pointing device.

How easy is it to create a web site? With NetObjects Fusion MX, you can build a functional web site in minutes, but the program does not run by itself. It requires some thought. Before you run the program, you need to decide what you want your web site to do. Are you merely posting information? Are you collecting information? Or are you trying to sell something? The program can help you with some of the details, but you have to decide on the overall approach.

If you are uncertain of your programming skills, the built-in Site Wizard will design your web site using one of several templates. I recommend using the Site Wizard to do the basic design. If nothing else, it will give you some ideas on how to, and how not to, design your web site. Later on, you can build a web site from scratch using Fusion.

The first time you use the program, you will be asked to fill in some personal and/or business information. The main purpose of collecting this information is registering your program, but this information can also be used later on for automatically filling in your company information when creating the web site.

Fusion opens with its Services page. From there, you can choose several options including using the Site Wizard. If you choose the Site Wizard, the program immediately provides a brief summary of the three steps you follow to create your web site. First, you indicate what type of web site you wish to build. As you point to each option, check marks appear in a list to the right indicating which pages will automatically be created. The site options are services, products, organizations and general. Once you choose an option, you can add other pages by checking the appropriate boxes or removing pages by deselecting those options. When done, you click "Next" to go to step two.

In step two, you choose a visual style that will be consistent throughout your web site. You have seven style choices with each offering two to five color combinations. Overall, you have 26 choices. Most are actually bland, but some are hard on the eyes and the psyche. Obviously, the company did some market research with these choices but did not consult enough with social psychologists and others who specialize in studying the effects of color schemes on web surfers. For example, their yellows are jarring enough to drive up a person’s blood pressure and drive away clients while some of their other color schemes are distracting enough to draw attention away from the product being presented.

Step three asks you to "tell visitors about yourself." This screen automatically fills in with the information collected during the registration process, but the program allows you to change the information as needed. If you were working on a web site for someone else, you would put that company’s information here. When you click on "Finish" the information is transferred to common areas on your web site. Surprisingly, there is no facility here for adding the company logo, motto or trademark.

The above simple steps can take as little as two minutes to complete. The hard part is taking the Fusion-generated pages and modifying them to suit your needs and personality. It requires (gasp!) WORD PROCESSING SKILLS! Fear not, Fusion has a built-in spell checker, but you must invoke it for it to work.

You would modify your site by maneuvering through a site map and then clicking on Page at the top of the screen. You will then go to an edit window. At this point, you can add your logo. You can delete the "Built with NetObjects Fusion MX" logo at the bottom of the page although that seems unfair since the program really did do most of the work.

Each generated page is quite small so that scrolling is held to a minimum. Page clutter is still a major problem on many web sites, second in severity of irritants to pop-up ads that can crash a computer. Also, because the logo is added at the page level, you have to add the logo on each page individually This was annoying.

As I suspected, there is no built-in shopping cart and no simple way to incorporate credit card processing. Furthermore, to create forms for feedback, I had to leave the site wizard and work in the page view. Even the table-building function is a bit difficult to grasp when compared to, say, WordPerfect. This really limits the market for this program to very small companies that want very simple web sites. For a fee, you can add features such as counters and traffic analyzers, but most businesses would prefer to have direct access to affordable shopping carts and credit card processing on the CD.

On the plus side, I did not have to call any technical support person, much less my specially assigned tech support person. Really, the extra material enclosed for me was quite unnecessary as the manual was easy to read and understand and the program is mostly user-friendly. It is just not extensive enough yet.

If all you need to do is give out information, then this program more than meets your needs. If you want to sell an extensive inventory though, I recommend using a company like Verisign, which can provide comprehensive services from the domain name to the catalog, shopping cart, and credit card processing for a modest fee. Its web page designer is not quite as easy as Fusion MX, but the tradeoff of more services makes it a better deal.

NetObjects Fusion MX $100 direct from NetObjects; $95 at CompUSA.

NetObjects, 301 Galveston Drive, Redwood City CA 94063. www.netobjects.com  Phone: 650-482-3200, 888-892-0702. Tech support: 888-888-8993, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PST Monday-Friday but you will be charged for calling. Better to go to NetObjects, web site via the help menu in Fusion or sending a message to: support@netobjects.com. Tech Support is free online to registered users.