FrontPage for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Using Microsoft's Web Design and Development Program"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

FrontPage is Microsoft's web page HTML editor and web site development and management software. FrontPage is designed primarily to help ordinary people put up web sites and is not popular with professional designers and developers, most of whom scorn it.

Actually, I use FrontPage myself, because I like its web site management capabilities. I'm not a pixel-perfect artsy-fartsy designer so I don't have to care about that.

I do recognize that it does things to my HTML and I don't appreciate having to constantly go behind it to clean up and correct my code.

FrontPage does ridiculous things like put a new font tag in with every paragraph tag even though I haven't changed the font

It's inefficient and makes web pages load into your browser more slowly than necessary. And if you're like me, you're impatient with web pages that appear too slowly.

Microsoft FrontPage also does something very frustrating. Sometimes when I'm making a correction using the browser view, it adds a whole slew of font tags between letters. It's ridiculous and I don't understand why they don't change it -- I have to go into HTML view and clean up a ton of stupid font tags.

Also, FrontPage irritates search engine optimizers because it buries the title tag -- the most important tag to search engines -- under many other meta tags in the head portion of the document

On the plus side, if I change the name of a page FrontPage will automatically update all links to that page. It has a lot of capacity for JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets and Dynamic HTML which I don't use.

FrontPage also comes bundled with a cool image editing program called Composer - which for reasons unknown to anyone outside of Redmond WA is not sold separately.

If you use it, you must make sure that your web site host supports FrontPage extensions. Actually, I don't use any of the extensions myself so it's probably not critical. But you must then FTP your site when you upload. It will update everything automatically when you do this, another advantage I like, even when FTPing instead of updating a site with extensions.

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