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FUSION 5 HELPS NON-PROGRAMMERS BUILD SITES

Dear Final Debug: I see there’s a new version of NetObjects Fusion out. Should I care?

Final Debug Responds: It depends on who you are. If you’re a technically astute person who builds Web sites for a living, the site-building tool might be useful as a prototyping package, but not to create live sites. The new version 5 of Fusion is geared toward non-programmers — those who have jobs at a company where Web-building is only a small part (and, likely, the most technical part) of what they do. These people don’t view site-building with the same single-minded obsession that professional Web designers do; all they want is for their rudimentary site to work.

As a result, Fusion 5 doesn’t have the single-most important feature to full-time Web builders, which programs like Macromedia Dreamweaver offer — the chance to switch between editing a page in WYSIWYG mode and at the source-code level. The new Version 5 makes some parts of the HTML directly available — certainly more than in previous versions — but if NetObjects hasn’t included true “round trip HTML” by Version 5 of the program, it’s likely that it isn’t going to happen in future versions either.

The technical improvements in Fusion 5 include easier ways to graft navigational directions onto every page, full support for Cascading Style Sheets, much better filters for importing material written in outside programs (especially the unfortunately ubiquitous Microsoft Word), and the above-mentioned limited source-code-editing capabilities. You can preview pages now within Fusion without having to open a browser, but any designer whose pages are going to be viewed in various browser environments will want to test his or her work. During prototyping, however, internal preview should be sufficient most of the time.

Most of the upgrades were made with non-experienced non-programmers in mind, so it’s not surprising that the biggest difference between Fusion 4 and 5 is the new Online Guide. The guide lets those building their first Web site figure out what they want to accomplish on their new site, design and populate a site that meets those needs, and use various online resources (such as hosting and widgets) to meet various needs, like commerce-enabling a site and evaluating traffic. There’s an e-commerce angle here, too — the idea is to get Fusionaires to purchase additional products and services — but even those who don’t buy anything can get an education this way. Programmers might not opt to use Fusion 5 as their primary site-building tool, but it’s a fine means by which non-programmers can learn the basics of building attractive and useful Web sites.

Fusion 5 lists for $299 new; an upgrade from a previous version of Fusion costs $99; an upgrade from a competing program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver is priced at $199.