By Lee Schlesinger
Network World, 9/28/98

Building an intranet page these days is relatively easy, thanks to the advent of simple publishing tools and the ability of many applications to save output to HTML or even directly to the Web. What's not so easy is making content look attractive.

Making your content engaging is more important than you might think. Sure, your users will visit your intranet site when they have to; the trick is to make them want to.

We recently looked at three packages that help create graphical elements for your site. Their usefulness varies widely.

At the low end is NetStudio's NetStudio 1.0. The product is intended for casual users, but its failure to follow common interface conventions will frustrate a novice audience. On the high end, Macromedia's Fireworks 1.0 gives you firepower to tweak your Web graphics in almost any way you can imagine. However, its complexity makes it best suited for graphics professionals. Somewhere in the middle is Jalapeno Software's Hot Buttons 2.0, which creates great individual components can't create more than one object at a time or apply styles to groups of objects.

Stylin' Pages

The product comes with only 10 bundled styles - far fewer than products such as Microsoft's FrontPage or NetObjects' Fusion. You can create new styles, but you'll need to design the components outside of the program if you want anything more than simple geometric shapes and colors.

Customizing individual banners and buttons is needlessly difficult. For example, instead of putting you directly into a newly created banner's text field, you have to click to enter it.

The program then brings up a text box rather than letting you edit in place. What's more, if you happen to use a font size that makes your text overrun the limits of the banner, the program won't stop you. And, as another point of confusion, you must press the Escape key, not the Enter key, to stop entering text.

Button label text suffers from similar problems. For one thing, it's not centered. For another, if you create a button bar and choose to reformat the text, you must do so individually for each button.

Right-clicking in any object doesn't bring up the expected context-sensitive menu - it does nothing. Do you want to insert a photo or graphic into a banner? You'd better be sure that element is the right size; NetStudio won't let you change it.

A hot tip

If Hot Buttons would let you save styles and apply them to multiple objects the way NetStudio does, this program would be a great tool for Webmasters looking to spruce up their sites. Without the NetStudio functionality, however, it's probably not robust enough for corporate use.

Fireworks for experts

Unlike the other tools we looked at here, Fireworks isn't designed solely to create simple components. It can blend vector and bitmap graphics and create animations and JavaScript actions - operations the other tools wouldn't dream of tackling - and do so with the precision of a tool for print graphics.

Surprisingly, however, Fireworks stints on the simple things. While you can use multiple fills, brushes and layers to create pages, you can't simply create a button or a banner using a wizard, for example.

Perhaps Macromedia will someday develop a simplified version for the masses in the same way Adobe created PhotoDeluxe as a kind of PhotoShop for Dummies. If it does, maybe it could call the product Firecracker.