Eight month old NetObjects Inc has now launched its Net-Objects Fusion Web site building and maintenance application, claiming it is the easiest way yet of building a site and ensuring everything is kept up to date. The Redwood City, California firm also signed deals with IBM Corp, UUNet Technologies Inc, Netscape Communications Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc’s JavaSoft Inc division for various support and marketing initiatives. The company is claiming the tool to be the first to take a site-oriented approach, rather than a page-oriented one, and somewhat grandiosely, that it is a quantum leap akin to the Macintosh interface over text-based interfaces in the 1980s. Its principal features are SiteStructure, which gives a hierarchical view of the site, and enables pages to be dragged and dropped around the site. PageDraw is the visual page development tools that gives pixel-level control over a page’s content, supporting Java, ActiveX and Shockwave, with no HyperText Mark-up Language knowledge required. And SiteStyle enables a uniform look-and-feel to be applied to the site. It also includes some 50 predesigned site styles. In fact, style is something the folks at NetObjects are very keen on. The so-called chief creative officer is Clement Mok, a leading Web site designer, and chief executive Samir Arora was one of the Macintosh interface design team in the 1980s, as well as the former chief executive at Rae Technology Inc. NetObjects raised $5.4m in first round financing from Norwest Venture Capital in February and is currently negotiating for more. The beta version of NetObjects Fusion for Windows95 and Windows NT Workstation 3.5.1 is free at www.netobjects.com, while version 1.0 will be released next month for $ 700, $500 if bought before September 25. IBM will bundle NetObjects Fusion with DB2, including NetObjects Fusion in a new offering called net.data, a database interface for the Web.
