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ShopZone, a follow-on to Breakthrough Software's Internet Business Breakthrough tool, supports online payments via CyberCash and IC Verify.

Microsoft Corp. Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise Edition
For Windows NT-centric storefronts, Visual Studio is a serious tool for designing Web pages that need customized business logic--via Visual Basic, C, C++ or Java--such as our car-insurance site. It didn't offer prebuilt storefront templates, shopping carts and tax-calculation modules as INTERSHOP 3 and ShopZone did. Nor was Visual Studio's Web-page editing, via FrontPage 98, as sophisticated or well-organized as that of NetObjects Fusion. Even in combination with Microsoft's Site Server and IIS 4.0's ASP technology, Visual Studio took a back seat to ColdFusion's easy-to-script Web server environment. Nonetheless, for storefront creation involving anything beyond a casual programming effort, Visual Studio is the tool to choose.

A judicious combination of Visual Studio and the Windows NT version of any other product we tested here can produce a Web store with a long lifespan, able to accommodate growth in complexity and function. Visual Studio pervaded our testing as we sought to add business automation in other products. Indeed, processing insurance applications in the DynaBase environment was only possible via the computer programming we did in Visual Studio.

Microsoft's Web-site development tools required a significant amount of programming effort but gave us a storefront that looked and behaved exactly as we specified. As we designed our customer-recognition, shopping cart and product-catalog storefront interfaces, we worked primarily with Visual Studio's Interdev component. Using Interdev as a base, we forayed into Visual Studio's Java language environment to add function to our shopping cart, and to Visual Basic to calculate sales tax and shipping charges. For our insurance site, we turned to Visual Basic to program the processing of application forms. In each case, although we had to start from scratch, the result was a site to which we could add whatever new processing and automation we wished.

Macromedia Dreamweaver 1.2
We liked using Dreamweaver 1.2 for its excellent visual Web-page design features. As we built our storefront Web pages in Dreamweaver, it provided us with a wide range of editing tools, including an HTML source-code browser, Cascading Style Sheets, timeline-based dynamic HTML animation of JavaScript-managed graphical screen elements and drag-and-drop assembly of Web page elements. You might use Dreamweaver in conjunction with ShopZone or NetObjects Fusion, for example, to spruce up and enhance your storefront Web pages. However, while Dreamweaver is a good visual HTML editor for the appearance and layout of individual Web pages, it doesn't pretend to understand e-commerce, nor does it offer a scripting language you can use to customize the behavior of a storefront Web site.

Dreamweaver's sitewide management wasn't as comprehensive or useful as that of NetObjects Fusion. Yet Dreamweaver integrated easily and seamlessly with NetObjects Fusion when we specified Dreamweaver as Fusion's external HTML editor. Its precise control over generated HTML made its pages terse and quick-loading.

Although difficult to put to good use in a virtual storefront, Dreamweaver impressed with its ability to support version 3 browsers by converting pages based on style sheets and layers into pure GIF images. But its link validation, which let us search a site for broken links and orphaned files, wasn't as thorough as ColdFusion Studio's.

We also liked Dreamweaver's presentation of color-coded HTML and Macromedia's inclusion of Allaire's HomeSite Web-page design tool in the Windows version of Dreamweaver, and BBEdit, a text editor, in its Macintosh counterpart.

When we added hand-coded HTML statements to our Web pages, Dreamweaver preserved our customizations across editing sessions. It also generated JavaScript to detect the browser and version at run time, a feature that we used with conditional hyperlinks in our HTML to send users to separate browser-optimized URLs.

Barry Nance, a computer analyst and consultant for 28 years, is the author of Introduction to Networking, 4th Edition (Que, 1997) and Client/Server LAN Programming (Que, 1994).

You can reach him via the Internet at barryn@erols.com.