Product Review: FrontPage 2000

Several years ago (way back in 1994) I had to put together a heck
of a lot of documentation to help me get my job done. I started
with Microsoft Word, writing over a thousand pages in a couple
of months. This was all documentation about how to manage our
mainframe computer system and it's associated application
programs.

After a while, I decided it would be better to maintain this set
of documents on an intranet instead of as printed manuals. Why?
Well, I was so fast at writing and changing the text that the
documents were out-of-date as soon as I printed them. I thought
it would be good to store them as a local web site, thus allowing
anyone accessing them to always get the most recent version.

I looked around briefly for a product which would allow me to
create this intranet without too much bother. I rejected most
products right away because they required me to learn HTML: I
wanted to write documentation, not learn some obscure coding
language (I already had learned too many of those and I knew
exactly how long and difficult it can be).

Somehow I managed to stumble upon a nice, new (at the time)
product called FrontPage. I liked the program right away, simply
because it had a great WYSIWYG editor which made it extremely
simple to create web pages. I especially liked the way that
FrontPage implemented the creation and editing of tables.

Understand, I looked at a lot of programs and I've continued
looking since that time. Virtually all of the programs that I've
seen didn't have a well defined way to create tables. FrontPage
was different - tables were (and are) very well implemented.

That was an early version of the program (I think it was
FrontPage 97), and it's changed quite a bit in the intervening
years. FrontPage 97 tended to crash a lot, and FrontPage 98
bombed out even more often. However, FrontPage 2000 turned out
to be just about perfect for my needs (which, admittedly were
very simple).

FrontPage 2000 is fast and easy to use, which are my primary
motivations. In addition, it's easy to learn and teach to people
who don't have any desire to be webmasters. They just want to
create some nice looking web pages and focus on content.

Now, some cautions. Don't even think about using the template
feature of any version of FrontPage. This is one of the most
poorly implemented, idiotic features even implemented by
Microsoft. Use templates and you will be immediately branded
"amateur", and your site will not be looked at seriously.

Be careful using any of the "special" features such a hover
buttons, dynamic effects and so on. The implementation in
FrontPage is, well, stupid. Also, if you want to use CGI
routines, then you cannot use FrontPage's automatic upload
feature (it will corrupt your CGI routines and data).

So why use FrontPage at all then? We use it at our office,
mostly because we have already purchased the entire Microsoft
Office suite and FrontPage just happens to come with it all.
This makes it a very obvious choice for our environment.
FrontPage is not cheap by any means, and it would be difficult
to recommend for a home environment. There are other editors
which cost less (although they are usually less functional as
well). I'll go over these in a future series of articles. I've
actually found that the old FrontPage Express program that
used to come with Internet Explorer is more than adequate for
most people.

Oh yes, as far as FrontPage XP (also known as FrontPage 2002) -
don't even bother. This newest version is a huge step backward.
If all you can get hold of is this new version, then find
something else.