Microsoft
FrontPage:
Create Web Pages Without HTML Knowledge
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
One way to create web pages from scratch without
using HTML is to use an editor that hides the HTML from you,
letting you edit a web page as easily as you would use a word
processor. These programs are called WYSIWYG (What You See
is What You Get) editors.
Microsoft's FrontPage is one of the most popular WYSIWYG editors,
mainly because it comes as part of Microsoft Office, which
lots of people buy just to get Word and Excel. FrontPage is,
therefore, seen as a cheap and easy solution, and the fact
that it works very similarly to the other Microsoft Office
programs is a plus as well.
Using FrontPage
FrontPage is very easy to get started with: you can either
create a single page, or a whole 'web' (FrontPage's word for
a set of inter-connected pages). You can use the buttons on
the toolbar to do simple things like set your text's font,
make text bold and italic, make links and insert graphics.
Going up to the menus will give you access to a few more complicated
functions, such as table creation. Part of the reason FrontPage
is so popular is that it has all sorts of little scripts ready
to insert into your page, including hit counters and animations.
FrontPage Extensions
FrontPage is quite unique in that many web hosts have special
'FrontPage Extensions' installed, that allow to upload your
site easily from FrontPage to your host. In most cases, though,
you'll be better off just saving the files using FTP. You will
also need to have the Extensions installed on your server if
you want the forms FrontPage produces to work, or if you want
to be able to add its search function to your site.
Really, the Extensions are nothing more than a good reason
not to use FrontPage to design any dynamic elements of your
site – it will cause you no end of trouble. FrontPage is only
really any good when it comes to designing static pages.
FrontPage Templates
One of FrontPage's strong points, however, is that it has
an easy-to-use templating system. This means that you can download
templates and easily use them to create new pages in FrontPage.
It will create a navigation system for you as you go, using
information from the template. This can be a quick and easy
way to get started on your website, although you'll often need
to be careful to avoid doing anything that causes the carefully
worked-out layout of the template to break.
Problems with FrontPage
FrontPage's biggest problem is that it produces wildly non-standard
'Microsoft HTML'. This HTML is bad enough to be completely
un-editable by anyone who isn't also using FrontPage, and has
a tendency to display wrongly in any browser apart from Internet
Explorer. Even the default template you see before you've typed
a word in FrontPage isn't valid HTML!
Worse,
because of the amount of repetition FrontPage introduces
into your pages, they can often be much larger than they
need
to be and so take much longer for your visitors to download
than they should. It's bad enough that many sites offer programs
designed specifically to do nothing but clean up FrontPage's
terrible code.
Part of the reason there's quite a stigma attached to FrontPage
amongst web users is that it tends to produce pages that are
extremely amateurish. Some FrontPage sites can even crash web
browsers, because their authors decided to use FrontPage's
various animated navigation elements – FrontPage is all too
happy to quickly add in so much Javascript and Java that a
website becomes unmanageable. Page transitions are particularly
bad.
Overall, trying to create and manage a website with FrontPage
can be a big headache – it's all too easy to hit one of FrontPage's
bugs and mess something up, or load it with too many proprietary
features to the point where it's pretty much unusable to anyone.
Worse, if you open a half-finished web page in FrontPage, its
code will be messed up beyond repair.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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