NetObjects Fusion XII review

We found some of the new elements a bit baffling. The Cloud Burst technology, which the program claims can “deliver new SiteStyles, Web site templates” and so on, turns out just to be a link to NetObject’s online shop. You get a few extra templates for free, after which you have to pay. Likewise, NetObject Fusion XII’s SEO Additions appears to refer to the fact that it now generates descriptive URLs for the pages within your site, rather than cryptic ones. It should have been doing this anyway.

The program failed to find the word ‘background’ in the CSS file and told us it had made no replacements – we only asked it to find the word, not replace it.

There were also a couple of instances in which the program felt a bit buggy. When we replaced the placeholder images with real pictures, one of these didn’t align properly with the others – but only when viewed in Internet Explorer. When we tried to search the CSS file for a particular code snippet, we were repeatedly told that it couldn’t find the term – it was there – and that no replacements had been made. We hadn’t told it to find and replace, just to find.

This program is easy to use and it can create relatively good-looking sites. But it’s very expensive, some of the new features aren’t as exciting as they first appear and you still have to do a fair bit of tinkering to get the results you want. Real novice designers would be better off with a completely template-driven service such as Mr. Site.