Restaurant Les Panses

By Richard Blazek Monday, September 01, 2003 My stepson, Mario, has formed a co-operative with his friends and they are running a gastronomic restaurant in the lovely village of Albalat dels Tarongers which is near Sagunto (between Valencia and Castellon on the east Mediterranean coast of Spain). They have asked me to tender for a promotional web site for the restaurant and have ideas of forming a community around the web site to share recipes, ideas about food and maybe something else. Although such a web site can quite easily be created in City Desk, this tool is more suited to sites with extensive textual content. Any graphics work must be done outside and imported. I recently came across a tool called Net Objects fusion that appears to be well suited to the creation of sites with graphical menus. I have used the old and free version 2.0 for this first attempt. The company have a much newer and more capable version 7 now shipping. I found two really nice features in Net Objects. It is very easy to build a set of navigational menus using the tool. Once the structure has been set up, the addition of new pages automatically creates new links in all the relevant places. The links can be graphical leading to a very attractive appearance of the site. The latest version also has mouse-over features. The tool has a function to overlay text on a graphic on demand. If you overlay a new piece of text on a graphic in Paint Shop Pro, for example bacause you have changed your mind about the title of a page, or have a new page, then you need to change the text, save the new graphic and perhaps give it a new name. Then you have to link the new graphic into the page. All this can be time consuming. In Net Objects all this work is automatic. In the end, I opted for using CityDesk because the graphics created by Net Objects took a long time to load via my standard modem and CityDesk is simply more flexible. The current web site can be found at http://www.lespanses.com/ .

http://www.lespanses.com/

Home