Introduction to Microsoft FrontPage

Microsoft FrontPage is a "what you see is what you get" or "WYSIWYG" editor and web site administration tool from Microsoft for the Windows operating system . The application is designed to mimic Microsoft Office in look and feel, allowing users to easily build Web pages with drag-and-drop functionality. With the software installed on a user's computer, they can quick develop Web documents with elements drawn from other Office documents.

FrontPage is mainly used by the novice and is quite an effective tool to get beginners online and publishing their Web sites. For this reason, the software is quite popular. One of the most powerful aspects built into FrontPage is its site management capability. The same interface that is used to develop Web pages is also used to manage and manipulate those pages online.

FrontPage makes it easy to add various kinds of objects to your web pages, but not all are compatible with all web browsers, editors, and servers. Before using new features, you should ask yourself the following two questions:

1. Does the benefit of using the feature outweigh any inconvenience that may be caused to users of older or different web browsers?

2. Does the benefit of using the feature outweigh the cost of maintaining it, potentially in a different web editor?

Potent but Proprietary Features

As 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; 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.

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 has FrontPage software "extensions" installed on it. FrontPage Server Extensions are server-side components that let FrontPage interact directly with the Web server.

Through the server extensions, users can upload and maintain their Web site directly through the FrontPage application, without the need for a separate FTP application. Web authors can also utilize other innovative features, such as traffic reports that can be generated daily, weekly or month. The software also allows Web authors to develop database-driven Web sites. The Database Interface Wizard simplifies the creation of dynamic databases that can interact with the Web site.

Server extensions are native to the Windows hosting platform, but are also widely available on various Unix hosting platforms as well. Most paid Web hosts have FrontPage-enabled servers these days, while most free Web hosts do not have them.

In general, web developers do not use or recommend FrontPage because it produces large, inefficient code, which does not comply with W3C standards and often does not work with non-Microsoft browsers.

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