I'm still evaluating whether I should pursue building my website with this program or give up and look elsewhere. That I have to even post here and ask basic questions is the indication of a greatly lacking helps document. It fails to explain any concepts or the "why" one would want to do something. It handles most help subjects with "here's what you can do" always leaving the user with more questions than answers - usually the "how?" and always the "why?". None of the help buttons on the dialog boxes have help items associated with them -useless for learning what the options presented in the box mean. What are the purposes and reasons and concepts behind all the things you can supposedly do?
I mostly am left fumbling around trying to learn the program by trial and error with most of my tries producing no noticeable result or, when in Style view, causing the program to crash. This trial approach works well in most logical programs but NetObjects is very quirky and inconsistent.
Here's just one of many examples of this inconsistency: In style view, I select the "Text Object" style and change the background to a solid color box in the CSS common panel. When I try to then remove the box -click "none" or "automatic" the box turns white but fails to return to transparent. I can make it transparent in page view but it remains white solid in style view. There are many many more such frustrations and instability. Sometimes it works, other times no.
I'll change a font in page view, and then click it back to automatic and it doesn't revert back to the CSS style - very buggy!
A most fundamental question: what is the relationship between the CSS common box where one can change properties, and the properties box where one can also change properties? Example: I can change the text color in the Text properties as well as the CSS common panel. Which is used when and WHY? I understand the basic idea of CSS as I used it in Dreamweaver to some extent, but I do not understand how it is being implemented in NetObjects. - And it doesn't seem to be implemented with any consistency.
It's the basic functionality, stability and utter lack of real helps that is driving me nuts! Someone needs to explain the fundamentals quick or I'm gone. I keep hanging on because I love the concept of Site, Page, Style, and Assets views and the quick in program preview. - this makes total sense and I loved it right away because of this but... It could be great but it keeps fighting me and wasting my time.