This week, as Lena Martell

Two weeks ago I wrote about the down and dirty world of graphics packages. This time I'm on to the far more respectable arena of Web page generation, where unlike graphics, no one has a nude picture of his wife over his desk.

Unfortunately, this is because anyone with regular access to the internet has nude pictures of many other people's wives on his desktop. But I'm not one to get embarrassed over a little public nakedness, as long as it's not my own. And most of you have by now forgotten the Channel Awards, so really there's no need for me to even mention it. In conclusion, the world inhabited by NetObjects, the makers of Web page-generation software Fusion, is still wholesome.

It is, however, a very frightening world, because it reminds us of the terrible abuses of power that were perpetrated in the name of desktop publishing. It is a disturbing thought that a printing revolution's first fruits were a bunch of newsletters from design hell that looked like they had been printed by a potato. The 'anyone can be competent' theory of doing stuff like DTP and building Web pages is one of those ideas that leaves the friendly omniscient aliens who walk among us shaking their heads in sorrow.

Ordinary people should not be doing difficult things that other people will see or hear, mainly because ordinary people are crap at difficult things. That's where the adjectives 'ordinary' and 'difficult' came from. That's also why all radio phone-ins are embarrassing and why ordinary people impersonating pop stars on Stars In Their Eyes make your toes curl. Have you ever seen a friendly omniscient alien on Stars In Their Eyes? Too right you haven't ('You know him as Bill Parsons, they know him as Fnugel of Xaq, but tonight for us, singing One Day at a Time, we know him as Lena Martell!').

I'm very glad that Samir Arora, chief executive of NetObjects, is big on templates in his products. 'A small business can't afford to go to a design company and pay #100,000 for a Website,' he says. 'So we use top designers to do the design styles for us.'

His other plan is to train a channel that can help businesses avoid making their Websites look embarrassing. Thanks to NetObjects' strategic alliance with Novell, all of Novell's channel is going to be trained to help. Samir knows that Novell's channel not only has a lot more time on its hands these days, but is almost exclusively populated by benign beings from a far away planet whose citizens are prepared to save small businesses from making knobs of themselves on the Net. And most Novell resellers aren't the type of aliens that kidnap people and force them to have anal probes (known on their planet as 'adding value'), so they can probably look forward to some repeat business.

Unfortunately, I now have to retire from this column. You're in safe hands with the other columnists, but if they propose 'adding value' - even once - inform the authorities immediately.

Tim Phillips is a freelance IT journalist.