At Rae, the two Arora brothers and David Kleinberg developed an object-oriented environment called SOLO (Structure of Linked Objects),[2][3] which is the technological basis of NetObjects Fusion.

The hopes of the newly founded company were high,[4] and the reactions of the market and IT observers to the first two releases of NetObjects Fusion in 1996 and 1997 were very positive.

After a few years of great success, NOF fell back in market share and reputation against the competition, mainly Dreamweaver, though it always kept a dedicated user community.

In the last few years, sales showed a slight downward tendency, staying flat in 2008 with a revenue of $2.5 million.

NOF comes with a graphical user interface similar to desktop publishing applications like Pagemaker or InDesign.

[10] After the first use of a pre-release version in 1996, photojournalist Rick Smolan said: "NetObjects was the only tool that would enable a team of the world's top picture editors and writers to become instant Web page designers.

The user operates with a draw-based layout editor very similar to Desktop publishing (DTP) or Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software.

With version 11, NetObjects Fusion moved along to CSS-based layout to enable pixel-level control of all objects on the page.

[13][14] NetObjects Fusion release 11 still offers table-based layout as an option to maintain upwards compatibility to complex projects built with earlier versions.

For instance, novices are able to build a small site with styles that come with the product, and set up a simple online shop with the built-in e-commerce engine.

Experts can take advantage of NOF's layout capabilities and use it as a mere front-end to PHP/SQL database or advanced e-commerce solutions.

[18] Third-party support was one of the highlights in earlier times, but seems to have been discouraged by Website Pros' policy to offer their own components.

Many formerly popular components by third-party vendors like Coolmaps or Bitmotion have been discontinued or remain in the state of just maintaining compatibility to new versions of NetObjects Fusion without further development.

Depending on complexity and the user's working method, a single project might have reached its limits of performance and handling at a few pages.

With release 11, relying on improved database connectivity and the ability to integrate XML-files into any objects on pages, scalability is not seen as an issue any more by the vendor.

Since the acquisition of NetObjects Fusion, Website Pros kept a steady pace of new releases with enhanced functionalities.

Enabling typical Web 2.0 sites, a collection of AJAX widgets like accordions and tagged panels have also been introduced with release 11.