http://www.ComputerBob.com/guides/guide_frontpage.php .
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by ComputerBob
August 3, 2001
Last Updated November 23, 2001
Microsoft FrontPage 2000 is software that helps people create Web sites. In order to understand the basics of FrontPage, it is helpful to first have an understanding of how Web sites are created and how the World Wide Web works. When I first created my personal Web site in 1997, there were relatively few Web sites on the Internet, and many of them were boring, text-only sites created by cutting-edge techno-geeks. By the time I had created my ComputerBob Web site in 1998, it had to compete for viewers' attention along with hundreds of thousands of other Web sites that contained professional graphics and color photographs. Today, there are millions of visually stunning Web sites that contain animated graphics, photographs, real-time audio and video files, software downloads and much more, and many of today's sites were created by children.
A Web site is one or more pages of related information that can be viewed over the Internet, using browser software like Microsoft Internet Explorer. Currently, nearly all Web pages are created with a programming language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML is a relatively simple display language, using English-language commands (called "tags") designed to display things on Web pages, like text, hyperlinks, and graphics. Each line of HTML code describes how to display different elements that appear on a Web page. For example, among other things, the HTML code of this page describes where to find, and then where and how to display each of the three separate graphics that comprise the ComuterBob page logo that appears at the top of this page -- the letter "c," the rotating globe, and the "mputerBob" part of the logo; where and how to display the search engine boxes that appear to the right of the logo and each of the navigation buttons that appear below the logo; what size, color, and type of borders to use for the table in which this text appears; which font face, color, and size to use to display these words; which words to display in each paragraph of this article; and which words to bold-face, display in a different color, or turn into hyperlinks.
If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your browser, you can view this Web page's HTML code in a separate window by clicking on the View menu at the top of your screen and choosing Source from the drop-down menu that appears. When you're done viewing the HTML code, click the X in that window's upper-right corner to close it. When you're done viewing the HTML source code of this page, browse to my ComputerBob home page and view its HTML source code and then come back here. If you're using a browser other than Internet Explorer, read your browser's Help section to learn how to view the HTML code of the Web pages that you visit.
As you can see by viewing the HTML code of my ComputerBob home page, which has tables displaying within other tables, HTML can look really, really messy and be very hard to follow, depending on how you want a Web page to look. However, don't let that scare you away from creating your own Web pages. While Web purists and anyone who wants to create Web pages for a living should know how to program their Web pages in HTML as well as how to write programs using several other programming languages to add shopping carts and other interactive features to their Web sites, anyone can create attractive and useful Web pages or even entire Web sites without having to know much at all about HTML programming, thanks to Web page creation software like Microsoft FrontPage.
Microsoft FrontPage software looks and works like a very high-end word processor, except that instead of creating pages of information that are designed to be printed, it lets you easily create Web pages. With FrontPage, you create Web pages by typing words and inserting other elements onto the screen, and then using menus and other tools to manipulate those elements until they look the way you want them to look. You can select words and click on icons to quickly set colors, fonts, sizes and other text options. If you want some words to appear as a hyperlink on your page, you simply highlight those words, click on FrontPage's Hyperlink button, and either click on the name of the destination page, or type the Web address of the page that you want the hyperlink to go to when someone clicks on it. To create a table, click on the Table tool, select the number of rows and columns that you want, and the table appears on the screen. Then, you can click your cursor inside any of the table's cells and either type some text, click on an icon to insert a picture, or do your choice of any of several dozen other options. As you type and click and drag things around on the screen, FrontPage automatically writes the appropriate HTML code for you. If you move or rename a Web page, FrontPage automatically updates the hyperlinks on any other pages in your Web that have links to the moved or renamed page. If you want to learn about how HTML works, or if you already know HTML and want to manually tweak your pages' code, or even write entire pages of HTML code yourself, you can view or edit your pages' HTML code at any time by clicking on the HTML View tab at the bottom of the FrontPage window. When you finish creating your Web pages, you can use FrontPage's Publish feature to send (publish) them to your Web host's Web server, so that others can see them on the World Wide Web. FrontPage automatically publishes only the pages that you've changed since the last time you published your Web, which can save you a lot of publishing time if you have a big Web site.
Because FrontPage is designed with Web beginners in mind, it includes several proprietary features that make it easy for beginners to add popular functions to their Web sites -- functions that would be much more difficult to add if they had to program them themselves. A few examples of proprietary FrontPage features are themes, which make it easy to use the same colors, fonts, background, navigation buttons, and other visuals on all of the pages of a Web site; hit counters, which show how many visitors have viewed a particular Web page (see the hit counter near the bottom of my ComputerBob home page); online forms, which let you create forms with drop-down menus, checkboxes, text boxes and other elements that allow your Web site to collect and/or email you information about your site's visitors; and Include Pages, which allow you to create a boilerplate page that you can "include" within other pages (see the copyright notice at the bottom of each page of this Web site) -- if I change my copyright notice Include Page, that copyright notice automatically changes at the bottom of all of the other pages on which it is included. The main downside to using FrontPage's proprietary features is that they only work if you publish your Web site to a Web server that is "FrontPage-enabled," meaning that the Web server has FrontPage software "extensions" installed on it that allow your FrontPage features to work. Most paid Web hosts have FrontPage-enabled servers these days, while most free Web hosts do not have them. For more information about Web hosts, see ComputerBob's Guide To Web Hosts.
Many Web purists have nothing but disdain for FrontPage and anyone who uses it. They complain bitterly about the fact that Web pages created in FrontPage often have bloated, hard-to-follow, non-standard HTML code. They also don't like FrontPage's proprietary features, which appear to them to be further evidence that Microsoft intentionally subverts industry standards -- like proper and standard HTML -- by creating and promoting its own, often-changing, proprietary features. I can personally vouch for the fact that, with my ComputerBob.com Web site, FrontPage's Publish feature is painfully slow and unnecessarily frustrating, often taking 10-15 minutes and sometimes taking up to 35 minutes to publish my Web site, depending on how many pages I've added or changed. First, it often takes 5-10 minutes just to compare the pages on my local Web to the live pages on the Web server, so that it can figure out which pages have changed. I can't walk away during that process because, after it compares my hundreds of local pages to my hundreds of live pages, it sometimes puts up a dialog box, asking me if I want my changed local pages to replace my old live pages -- If I'm not there to click on the "Yes" button, FrontPage waits for me to return and answer its question before it finally publishes my pages. After it publishes my new and changed pages, it takes another 3-10 minutes to update the changes it made on the Web server before finally telling me that my site is published. I can also vouch for the fact that FrontPage's "search and replace" feature is a pain in the neck to use, because it forces me to individually view and then click to approve each "replace" before it does it. FrontPage also seems to me to have some serious problems dealing with Web sites that have many pages. For example, when I've done a "search and replace," FrontPage has often acted like it was replacing text on my pages, but afterward I've discovered that it hadn't done it at all. I once spent more than a few frustrating hours trying to replace just one line of text that appeared in 179 different pages of my Web, using "search and replace." After individually viewing and approving each of the 179 changes, I redid the "search" and discovered that FrontPage had actually only changed 10 of the 179 pages. So, I did the entire search and replace all over again, only to discover afterward that it hadn't changed ANY of the pages the second time! It acted like it might have been an insufficient RAM memory problem, but my PC has a huge 224MB of RAM, and FrontPage was the only software I had running at the time. The problem went away and "search and replace" worked correctly after I rebooted my computer. Unfortunately, it happened again just a few hours later, when I tried to do a different "search and replace," so it appears to me that FrontPage's "search and replace" feature has a serious problem dealing with a lot of Web pages at one time.
For nearly 3 years, I created all the pages of my ComputerBob Web site, including this one, using Microsoft FrontPage 97 and FrontPage 2000. I also taught college courses in how to use both versions of FrontPage. If you're a Web beginner or even an experienced Web author who's looking for software to help you create a Web site of less than 50 pages, Microsoft FrontPage is inexpensive, easy to use and it may do everything that you need it to do. If you're a Web professional or if you want to create a large or complicated Web site, you would probably be better off using a faster, more powerful, more complicated, more expensive Web authoring tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver. A few months ago, I took the plunge and bought Dreamweaver. Now I'm developing a couple of Dreamweaver college courses. When I get really good at it, I'll even start using it on this site, and then I'll let you know what I think of it.
I spent two weeks trying to get a 3rd party forum script to run correctly on my Web server along with my FrontPage Web. I discovered that, right after I installed them, some of the forum script's files and folders would mysteriously chang or be completely deleted from my Web server, preventing the forum from running. Some more research and experimentation revealed that it was the Microsoft FrontPage extensions on my Web server that were doing the changing and deleting, without my knowledge or permission. I spent several more nights researching a solution, but I couldn't find any solution that would guarantee that 3rd party scripts would run when they are installed into a Microsoft FrontPage Web.
It turns out that, no matter what you do, your 3rd party script may work or it may not work. That's because, no matter what you do, the FrontPage extensions on your Web server may automatically change or delete some of the non-Microsoft script's installed files and folders, making it unusable, or they may not delete or change some of the script's installed files and folders. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a mystery and NOBODY can know for sure if the FrontPage extensions will change or delete any files or folders or if they won't.
The only way to guarantee that you're not going to have any trouble running 3rd party CGI/Perl/PHP scripts on your Web server is to not use the FrontPage extensions on your Web server -- disable them for you Web site -- most Web hosts provide an option that lets you enable and disable the FrontPage extensions for your Web site. If yours doesn't give you that option, then contact them and ask them to do it for you. After you disable the FrontPage extensions, you'll still be able to use FrontPage as your Web page editor if you want to, but you'll have to publish your Web site using FrontPage's FTP Publishing feature instead of its normal HTTP Publishing feature. You also won't be able to use any proprietary FrontPage features -- like FrontPage hit counters, online forms, the FrontPage Discussion Web (it's really lame anyway), or Include pages -- because they require the FrontPage extensions to be installed on the server in order to work. The good news is that, once you are free from having to use a FrontPage-enabled server (one with FrontPage extensions), you could choose to use a better Web editor, like Dreamweaver or ColdFusion to create and edit your Web pages, because none of those other editors need a FrontPage-enabled server. Plus, there are many alternatives on the Web that can replace most or all of the features that the FrontPage extensions provided, without the danger of changing or deleting any of your 3rd party scripts and files. You can find a list of some of those alternatives at MSFrontPage.Net.
Here's what I ended up doing: I spent several weeks, researching, testing, finding and developing new non-FrontPage solutions for the proprietary FrontPage features that I had used on my Web site. Then, I spent several long nights, using Macromedia Dreamweaver to painstakingly edit the HTML code of every single one of my Web pages, to remove all of the proprietary FrontPage codes and features and replace them with generic, straight HTML, 3rd party features. Then, I published test pages to make sure that everything would look and work exactly the same as it had before the conversion to straight HTML. Then, five weeks after I had started trying to solve the problem, I finally re-published my entire Web site without any proprietary FrontPage features. Then, I disabled the FrontPage extensions on my Web server and tested the new Web site thoroughly.
Yes, it was a lot of trouble and a lot of work, but through it, I learned a ton about both Dreamweaver and HTML, Now I'm free from having to use FrontPage, and I can run any 3rd party script that I want to on my Web site.
The bottom line is FrontPage is a great, easy to learn, easy to
use application that is perfect for beginners. It's probably not
the best choice for those who want to create large or complex Web
sites, but it has enough features that many people who use it will
probably never need to use anything else.