We all know that when you need to get a site done quickly, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors are the fastest. They offer a graphical user interface and often require little to no coding on your part. WYSIWYG HTML editors are sometimes given a bad name because of some people with no knowledge of the Internet try creating their own "homepage" about their obsession with a certain canned meat or something like that. Keep in mind, you can always make better use of a WYSIWYG editor if you have knowledge of HTML, how the Internet works, and some experience creating web pages. This brings me to the two editors who have singled themselves out as the best. Microsoft's Frontpage 97 and NetObjects' Fusion. Both of these editors take on drastically different methods of rapidly creating Web Sites. I'll try to go over some of the ups and downs of both and let you decide which one is right for you.

Microsoft decided to make their editor more like a word processor. You import images in, press a few buttons to align, and your site quickly begins to come into shape. If you need greater alignment, start placing tables down and begin splitting cells to the alignment you need. It does have some powerful features behind the simple interface. Frontpage comes with many wizards to guide you through things such as creating frames, forms, connecting to a database, and creating Javascript code. It also serves as a great administration tool and personal web server. Lets say you decide to change the name of an image or an HTML document, if it is linked on a number of other pages, it can be quite a pain to update the links. But with Frontpage Webs, it becomes as simple as selecting the image of document and renaming it! Frontpage takes care of fixing all the links. It also provides a graphical view of how the pages are linked to one another. Netobjects Fusion's main feature is its ability to let you drag an element anywhere on the page without limitations. It is the only product available that gives this sort of alignment. It too, has some powerful administration features, such as a graphical view of your site. It comes with a number of customizable Java applets, Shockwave movies, and other interactive elements. To help you out with graphics, it has a bunch of graphical banner and button styles that are fully editable in the program. There is also site templates that have complete sites set up for you, and all you have to do is fill in your own personalized content!

Now lets get down to some of the problems of each editor. Starting with Frontpage, you may notice that as your document gets longer in size, and has more elements and text inside it, the performance of the program will drop incredibly. Frontpage 97 was tested on a Pentium Pro 200 with 64 megs of EDO RAM, yet somehow, Frontpage slows to a crawl with very large documents. It can sometimes take up to 15 seconds for it to refresh the page after to type one sentance of text. Keep in mind, that most of the time, the performance is OK. Also, Frontpage seems to crash more often than NetObjects. Now onto my problems with NetObjects Fusion. The number one problem is the horrible code that the program outputs. If you try to edit it, have fun. Netobjects uses transparent one pixel images to align things perfectly in tables, if you change one thing, you may ruin the entire layout. Compared to Frontpage's steamlined efficient code, Netobjects definately lags behind. Also, if you are creating text layouts, you may have quite a task because it doesn't import text from Office, you'll have to either type it in manually in the program (using these really hard to manage text elements), or you'll have to import the text as HTML. Another problem is the fact that only one person can work on a NetObjects Fusion Web Site at a time unless each page is a separate Fusion file.

Now that I have laid out the features and problems of both editors. It if your choice which one to choose. If you are looking to quickly produce a graphically intensive site, choose NetObjects. A more business oriented site might choose Frontpage for its better administration and text handling. There is a huge price difference, though. NetObjects is about 4 times as costly. Just remember, choose the one thats right for YOU!