Prepared for the Santa Barbara PC Users Group Newsletter November 1998.

If you think that the world needs another Web page and that your thoughts are the essence needed to fill same, then you might as well do it properly. FrontPage's primary attraction is that it lets you get on with content without having to stumble over the arcane mechanics of Web publishing.

Microsoft's FrontPage 98 seems destined to follow in the footsteps of the other elements of the Microsoft Office suite and become a significant, if not the significant, tool for managing basic straight-forward web sites. So much so that it will become part of Office 2000 due out next year. It consists of three primary elements: FrontPage Explorer, FrontPage Editor, and the Web Server. The latter is more or less just there.

FrontPage Explorer is the tool that organizes the Web, while FrontPage Editor is the "word processor" that composes and edits individual pages.

FrontPage feels like a member of the Microsoft Office suite. The menus, toolbars, and general layout are familiar. It also integrates nicely with the other Office members. For example, you can open a spreadsheet in Excel, select a range of cells, and cut-and-paste or drag-and-drop the selection into the FrontPage Editor, where it appears as a table, all formatting from the source preserved. If you similarly copy a selection from Internet Explorer, it also preserves formatting, including tables and any link information in the selection. While you can create and edit a wide range of web pages using other page editors, such as Microsoft Word or even the slightly inhibited FrontPage Express that comes with Internet Explorer 4 and 5, the real power of FrontPage in doing web sites lies in FrontPage Explorer.

Should you need to examine the underlying HTML code, just click on the HTML tab, and you see it displayed with color coding of the HTML syntax. Reverting to HTML is sometimes helpful after having imported segments from a Web page or other source not created in FrontPage. Conversion to FrontPage's version of HTML is not always done the way you want it. Sometimes when changing back and forth amongst the various type of list items, the HTML can get mixed up, and it is more expeditious to sort out the HTML code than to figure out how to get it where you want—assuming you are conversant in HTML. It is also handy for inserting symbols that FrontPage does not handle, such as an m-dash; you merely type in — and, voilá, there is your long dash. This operation is much easier in Word, where you merely type Ctrl-Alt-dash. Accented letters are also easier in Word, where shortcut keystrokes are built-in. Another item that one gets used to in Word and has to adapt to in FrontPage is having to manually capitalize the beginning letter of a sentence. Within the HTML view, you can use tools such as search and replace, something that is not available in the truncated FrontPage Express.

FrontPage Explorer

The Explorer gives you several views of your Web. The most used is likely the Navigation view. This shows you in an organizational chart form the relationship and hierarchy of all the pages in the Web. If pages don't appear in the Navigation view, they don't appear in the web. The view is in two panes: the upper is the organizational chart; the lower is the list of files in the current folder. To enter a file in the chart, you just drag and drop it from the lower pane. The organizational chart is where you assign or change page titles. Reorganizing the web is merely a matter of dragging a page from one position to another.

Two tools are of prime use in maintaining a Web site. Shared Borders lets you specify where headings and navigation buttons go for all (or only some) pages. These borders can be top, bottom, left, and/or right. The buttons you put there are chosen from a menu of navigation options. Themes applies one of the supplied themes to the entire site (or to only selected pages.) If you don't like the current them, a single button click applies another. With the Software Development Kit, you can design your own theme. There are also a number of vendors selling themes. "A theme applies professionally designed, graphical page elements to the pages in a FrontPage web. FrontPage offers a gallery of over 50 themes that consist of similar design elements for bullets, fonts, images, navigation bars, and other page elements. When applied, a theme gives pages and navigation bars in a FrontPage web an attractive and consistent appearance."

Broken links should not be a problem as FrontPage has a tool to verify all hyperlinks. Whilst you are connected to the Web, FrontPage systematically checks every link and tells you which are broken. You then have the option of editing the link or the page.

In another mode, you can look at a list of all your files and see which ones are orphans with no links to them. This helps find deadwood and images or pages that you have neglected to include in the Web structure.

FrontPage Editor

Links

It is easy to create a link to either a page in the current web or to a site on the Internet. To do the latter, you start the Hyperlink dialog using the button on the toolbar, then in the dialog click on the button.  Leave the dialog open and switch to the Internet Explorer browser; if it is already running, its button on the taskbar will be blinking. If you are not already at the URL you want to link to, browse to it. Return to the dialog by clicking on the FP Editor taskbar button, and you will see the URL there.

Graphics

Insertion of graphics is simple and straightforward. You click on the image icon on the toolbar and a file-open dialog lets you find the graphic in the current Web, anywhere on your hard drive, or on the Internet. You can have the graphic display at its actual size or at any size you choose. If the image is a GIF file and you want it to be transparent, a make-transparent icon on the graphics toolbar lets you specify the color to be designated transparent.

Image Composer

Part of the FrontPage installation is Microsoft's Image Composer. It is similar in many functions to Adobe's PhotoShop and Corel's PhotoPaint. But with a different approach, which can be confusing if you are used to one of the others.

Publishing

Once your gem of a Web site has been composed and decorated, FrontPage has a Publish button on the toolbar. You will have to give it the FTP address where the pages are to go. The next time you publish, it will remember where to go, unless you choose a different destination by selecting Publish from the File menu.

Conclusion

By automating the main drudger of Web site maintenance, FrontPage lets you concentrate on the prime objective, which should be content.

Add-ons and extensions

Full Product Information is available on Microsoft's FrontPage web site at www.microsoft.com/frontpage/productinfo. Included is an Online Multimedia FrontPage 98 Demo  The information will not be repeated here.

The FrontPage 98 Themes and Web Templates Pack is available from Microsoft at www.microsoft.com/frontpage/resources/ttpack.htm.

Themes included:  Art Deco, BlurGlow, Canvas, Chalkboard, Loose Gesture, Modern Structure, School Days, TechnoOrganic

Web Templates Included: Class Web, Group Web, Personal Event, Team web

You can sign up for Microsoft's FrontPage Bulletin on-line.

There is a free Technical Overview Seminar at www.microsoft.com/seminar/98/Fp98Author/portal.htm

A complete tutorial is on-line at www.microsoft.com/frontpage/tutorial/tutorial.htm

Knowledge Base article list can be found at www.microsoft.com/frontpage/support/fp98kb.htm

How-to articles appear at www.microsoft.com/frontpage/resources/howto.htm

Clip Gallery Live

This site has over 8000 images available for free download. Can't give more information now since when I checked it, the site was down for maintenance and upgrade. www.microsoft.com/clipgallerylive

Reviews

ZD Net says, "When it comes to industrial-strength WYSIWYG, Microsoft FrontPage is like an anvil. Combining powerful site management tools with easily accessible HTML formatting options, FrontPage is intuitive enough to cut your teeth on, yet powerful enough to handle sophisticated interactivity."

PC Magazine January 20, 1998 Web Authoring Tools:   FrontPage gets the Editors' Choice nod for graphical authoring. "FrontPage 98 is the premier WYSIWYG editor, giving you excellent control over creating a site with a consistent look and feel. Its site management features are the best in this roundup, including a graphical view of your site."

Windows Sources "Consistently innovative--but with inconsistent implementations" "For managing sites and building framesets, FrontPage 98 surpasses the competition."

Sm@rt Reseller says, "Worth a Headline"

PC World April 1998 Painless Web Pages gives FrontPage a Best Buy   recommendation.

Inter@ctive Week Webmasters' Top Tools survey shows FrontPage as the top software with 13%, followed closely by HomeSite with 12.2%. Microsoft is again in third place with Word at 6.1%. Other products are below 5%. These number may seem low, but it appears that most web sites are still done by hand, since other shows at 33.6% and not applicable at 22.4%.

Bugs

BugNet reports some problems with discussion webs. Microsoft reportedly has a fix in the works. There is another problem with the Search function inside discussion groups, according to ZD-Net. More from PC Week Online.

Some sites, such as GeoCities, will not allow publishing of some of the file extensions included in FrontPage. See www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Park/8824/ for how to get around this. Other sites have a limit on the length of file names. Some of the files generated by FrontPage may exceed that limit. Tripod is one of the few sites to incorporate the FrontPage Server Extensions that allow you to add text searches, personal conferences, and much more.

Monday, 15 March 1999 23:54

by Fergus O'Malley