What is MS FrontPage?
Introduction
Microsoft's FrontPage is a lot more than just web design software. In fact, to those just getting their feet wet in the ocean of web development tools, it's probably more like a dream come true.
With its pre-designed themes, templates, and style sheets, FrontPage can help you build and publish a professional looking web site in just a few hours.
Features
With the latest release, FrontPage 2002, Microsoft has taken this software package to a new level.
Built-in templates and wizards allow you to create a web site in only a matter of minutes, and then customize it to make it your own. You can easily add graphics, integrate photo galleries, add backgrounds, create image maps, use pre-designed themes and adjust fonts and formatting in a WYSIWYG manner.
Microsoft has integrated features for web site creation with web site management, e-commerce, and graphics editing tools built right in. FrontPage 2002 even has the ability to help you better understand your visitors through usage analysis reports or get the lowdown on your site's performance with enhanced reports.
Many users will also find Frontage's interface easy to use since it looks and works like Microsoft Office. As part of the Microsoft Office family of products, it shares similar toolbars, menus, clipboards, and familiar features such as the customizable themes and background spell checking.
Since FrontPage is broadly available and broadly used you can find a wide range of web sites, books, training classes, web professionals and users groups to help you along the way. You can also choose from hundreds of web hosting companies that support creating and editing web sites directly on their servers with FrontPage extensions, and select from a variety of third party add-ons that extend the functionality of FrontPage even further.
The Downside
Are there drawbacks? Some. Functionality is somewhat limited in comparison to the other major design packages. Many advanced design features, such as the authoring of javascript effects and dynamic html elements, are virtually nonexistent. As a result, FrontPage is not usually considered a viable option for web development professionals.
Also, in order to use FrontPage's powerful content publishing tool to transfer your files to the web server your host must install a special set of FrontPage extensions. This normally isn't a problem, both Unix and NT hosts support this feature almost universally, but it can create complications later if you decide that a different software package would better suit your design needs.
Setup of custom cgi scripts can also get a bit tricky with the extensions installed. In fact, some hosts recommend that you don't transfer any files via ftp to assure that the FrontPage extensions aren't corrupted.
Conclusion
Despite these drawbacks FrontPage is still a great, feature packed, total design solution. With its extremely affordable price tag of $169 (street), FrontPage 2002 looks like a bargain compared to the other popular design packages such as Macromedia's
Dream weaver 4 ($299 street) or Adobe's Go-Live 5 ($284 street).
For the beginner, and perhaps even the intermediate user, Microsoft's FrontPage is by far the best solution to meet both web design and web publishing needs at a very reasonable price.
