Even TechoGeek Snobs Use FrontPage When No One Is Looking
Written: Sep 26 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: wide user base, extensive documentation
Cons: not standards based, HTML coding is cryptic
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| amerpie's Full Review: Microsoft FrontPage 2000 |
There is no Web development tool more widely used than Microsoft’s Front Page 2000. This does not necessarily mean that FP2K is the best product. Microsoft markets FrontPage as part of the Office Professional Suite and as in a stand-alone version. As with all Office products, there are a number of wizards available to help even the rawest novice create a small Web site. Countless intranets and amateur Web pages attest to this.
A Little History
FrontPage 2000 is the third Microsoft version of this product. As with many of Microsoft’s cash cows, another company whom Microsoft assimilated originally developed it. In FrontPage 97 and 98, there were two actually two separate programs. One was the tool used to develop and maintain Web sites, that is collections of related Web pages. The second tool was used in the creation of individual pages. In FrontPage 2000, these two features are combined into one program – thankfully
FrontPage is not the program of choice for high-end Web developers. It does not provide the control that a skilled developer can achieve with other products or by hand coding. The HTML code generated by the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page editor contains a lot of code that is extraneous and not part of standard HTML. For this reason, many professionals proudly shun it with noisy put-downs.
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Meaningless Note
Have you ever noticed how many people who code by hand feel that it is necessary to tell you on their Web pages that they created the page with nothing but Notepad and a covered wagon? Techno-geek pride is all that is! (I bet that little dig affects the ratings I get on this review)
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What If You Aren’t a High End Web Developer?
I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars creating Web pages with FrontPage. Yes, I can code by hand and I do know how to add HTML to pages when FrontPage stubbornly refuses to, but 95% of what I do, I do with FrontPage.
I use it because it saves me time. It automates things that would take hours to do by hand. For example, if I decide to rename a page on a Web site, FrontPage automatically changes the code on every page linked to the renamed page. Without this feature, I would have to find and manually change every reference to the page.
My Favorite Features
Themes - FrontPage themes are color coordinated schemes for fonts, headings, links, backgrounds, and bullets. They are professionally designed and they look it. One of the most frequent mistakes on Web pages is the overuse of colors and fonts. Another problem is a lack of design consistency from page to page. To avoid cookie cutter web sites, FrontPage allows users to edit themes to make them unique.
Broken Link Checker - Some of the corporate Intranet sites I’ve worked on have numbered hundreds of pages. Every manager with a Web browser has a collection of links that he or she wants posted, internal and external. FrontPage has a feature that will automatically check every link on the site. It presents the Web master with a list of the links that need to be fixed.
Preview Mode - One of the most difficult part of creating Web pages is insuring that your work will appear correctly in different resolutions. There are still a lot of people out there surfing the Internet with 14-inch monitors set at a 640x480 screen resolution. FrontPage has a preview feature that will allow you to evaluate the appearance of a page at a variety of screen resolutions.
General WYSIWYG Stuff - In a lot of ways, creating Web pages in FrontPage is as easy as creating word processing documents in Microsoft Word. All of the character and paragraph formatting is simple. Creating tables is a snap. I can’t imagine a reason why I would ever want to create any of that simple stuff by hand again.
FrontPage Server Extensions - The FrontPage Server extensions are particularly helpful on an Intranet. They allow users to share and manage documents and to work with spreadsheets and databases from within their browser’s.
On Internet servers, the server extensions are useful for automating such tasks as page counters and threaded discussion groups.
Conclusion
This is a fairly well designed product with a large user base. Microsoft being Microsoft, FrontPage does have some problems with the standards adhered to by Netscape. Total reliance on FrontPage is probably not a good thing. To have more control of Web pages, it will eventually be necessary to learn some code. However, if you need to create something nice looking quickly, FrontPage is an excellent tool.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
amerpie
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Member: Lou Plummer
Location: Fayetteville, NC
Reviews written: 176
Trusted by: 154 members
About Me:
Stop the war. Bring the troops home now!
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