Building Is Easy With MX A lot of Web Authoring programs claim to be the fastest and easiest to use for the novice, and even though a lot of them are relatively easy to use and work with, none does it better than NetObjects Fusion MX(MX). Right out of the box we decided that we would build a complete site with data access complete and determine just how fast MX really is. After installation which is rather simple, just pop the CD in your drive and auto-start runs giving you access to either the complete CD contents or installation of the program. After installation you are immediately prompted to update or at least see if any updates are available. MX goes out and if available downloads and installs any updates, after this process you are asked if you want to use the Site Wizard to start a new site or go directly to the Services View page. Now if you really want to accelerate your project you can use the Site Wizard which will ask you a few questions about what the site is about like Products, Services, or Organizations of some type. Then you are asked about color or Site Style that you want to use, and then the final step is your profile which you create yourself which includes your pertinent information such as name, address, phone, etc. After completing this phase of development a complete Web site is developed right before your eyes, and with very little effort on your part you can adjust some of the text and the site is ready to upload to your provider.
Without The Wizard Was Still Easy Now if you elect not to use the Site Wizard you can start from scratch with a basic start page, this is what we did since we wanted to know just how long it would take to complete this page the old fashioned way. From the basic page we selected our Site Style and quickly had a layout of just what we wanted our Web site to say to visitors. Adding pages couldn't be easier than with MX, you just drop back to Site View and a complete layout of your site is placed for you to add, delete, or edit at will. Any changes that you make in Site View such as Banner names, or Navigation Buttons are instantly updated throughout your site. Changing Styles is like changing socks, you can try out every style available simply by clicking on Style and selecting a new Style and clicking add. After about 20 minutes of changing the look and feel of the site and importing pictures and graphics that we had on our hard drive, we were done. Clicking on Preview will generate and display your site in your favorite browser so that you can determine if this is what you want. MX supports Cascading Style Sheets(CSS), Importing of Microsoft Word *.doc format, Dynamic Database Access(DDA), and using the Layout Editor makes WYSIWYG really mean just that, What You See Is Really What You Get! Placement of pictures and graphics on our page was seamless, you could place images right down to almost the pixel placement, not like other programs that we have tried that was small chore to get things where you wanted them to be.
Others Don't Even Come Close When It Comes To Ease Of Use Adding an active database was also pretty easy to do, you just click on the Data List icon and drag it onto your page, assign the fields to display and the order to display them, sort order and a stacked set of pages are built for you to adjust and layout as your see fit. You can use them static or ODBC connecting directly to the file for updates in real time. You will need a Web server installed for the latter of course. Even thought handling of data is not as good as some other programs that we have tested, for a small business this could be just the trick if programming and scripting is not in your skill base at this time. After adding our Access data and dressing up our pages we were ready to upload the finished product. Clicking on the Publish button from the toolbar will bring up a window that allows you to publish locally or to a remote site, some features will not work properly unless you publish either locally or remotely, so to see if the site really works properly we created a local site for testing and all worked well. Next step was to publish to our provider and by putting in standard information such user name, password, and ftp site we were up and running on the web in a total time of 35 minutes. Now if that isn't fast enough for you try completing a quality site in less time with another program and still have the consistency and quality of a site created with MX, we dare you!
