Web Site Design and Management Tools: NetObjects Fusion and Microsoft FrontPage News & Views Software Review

by Whitney Quesenbery Vice President, Design and Product Development Cognetics Corporation Microsoft FrontPage MSRP $149, NetObjects Fusion MSRP $695. Originally published in News & Views March, 1997 issue. Copyright 1997 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

Somehow it seems inevitable that we will always want just a little more than our authoring tools give us. This is certainly holding true on the Web. The problem is that what you want in an authoring tool depends on just what you are trying to do—and we are all trying to do different things. Marketing and print layout folks need more control over how the screen looks than HTML provides. People working on larger collaborative sites need tools to manage site construction. Now, a new generation of authoring environments is hitting the streets. Two of the most popular are Microsoft FrontFrontPagePage and NetObjects Fusion. They are both very impressive, but take very different approaches to site creation. NetObjects Fusion: a visual design tool NetObjects Fusion is made for the visual designer. It promises pixel-perfect placement of elements for hand-crafted pages. You start in a site map where you drag pages into a tree map. Not only does this give you an easy visual layout of your site, but the map feeds information to the automatic page creation tools. Choose a graphical style (one from their extensive library), and NetObjects Fusion will generate banners and button bars, adding text to blank button graphics. Page editing is done in a Visual Basic-style editor with a tool box of objects that you can drag onto the page, filling them with your text and images. It just doesn’t get any easier than that. But. (There always is a "but", isn’t there?) The pitfalls of their approach rapidly become apparent when you begin to work on a site with more words than pictures. NetObjects Fusion uses complex tables to create the page layout, locking the page into a specific width. If you have laid out the page for a 640 x 480 screen, it will have the same layout even if the browser window is wider and will be clipped if it is narrower. No re-sizing with automatic re-wrapping of the text. This is not a writer’s tool. Cutting and pasting little snippets of text into a text object is fine for a small site, but not as much fun when you have hundreds of pages to move into HTML. NetObjects Fusion stores the whole site in a database, creating the HTML only through a publishing process. This makes it difficult for more than one person to work on a site at the same time. Microsoft FrontPage: a site manager FrontPage is intended to be both a site management and a page creation tool for the non-programmer. You start in the Explorer, which gives you either a file manager-style list or a graphical link view of your site. From the Explorer you can create and manage the files in your site. When you move or rename a file, all of the references to it are automatically updated. On the down side, once your site grows beyond a few pages, the link view becomes so cluttered that it is useless. It does, however, give you one view that I have not seen in other site managers—a listing of which files within the site link to each page. Pages are edited in a WYSIWYG editor, which resembles the other Microsoft Office programs. You never (well, usually never) enter HTML codes, but use dialogs to add any information needed for the tags. Version 1.1 also includes the ability to edit the HTML directly -- a boon for anyone used to tweaking their own code. Although there are some interesting quirks, FrontPage is more than acceptable for basic pages without a lot of layout requirements. It will never be the kind of tool that creates really complex layouts. Publishing your site is a breeze, especially if the host server is running the FrontPage server extensions. Once a site has been created, you can continue to work on your local version, uploading changes, or you can work directly from the server -- quite an advantage, though it can be slow to load a site or page. FrontPage was originally developed for remote teams, so each file is identified with the person who last edited it, and there is a to-do list that is maintained as part of the site’s data files. Which one when? Both of these programs can be very powerful when the project needs their strengths, and you can work around their weaknesses. As always, you need to analyze your project’s requirements and your own (or your group’s) preferences before you make a decision. One of my favorite uses for NetObjects Fusion is for rapid prototyping. Its easy drag-and-drop lets me build an entire prototype in a matter of hours, which can be a real benefit when you need to show results quickly. If NetObjects Fusion is not the right development environment for the whole project, the HTML files it creates can be used to create page templates for use in another program. FrontPage is most valuable as a groupware tool. One project I’m involved in uses it as the repository for all of the notes, memos, and discussion -- as well as managing the site development work. The seamless publishing and the simple editor are just right for this ongoing project, with its light HTML interface design requirements.

Return to . . .

[News & Views] [STC-PMC Home] [STC Home Page]
Last updated: March 23, 1997 (rst)