Office 2000 Premium Part II: Design with Publisher, FrontPage, and PhotoDraw FrontPage Takes You to the Front of the Line Douglas Smith
What's New? FrontPage 2000 is a Web site creation and management tool based on Microsoft's earlier version FrontPage 98. What Microsoft has attempted to do is to make the program easier to use and add many requested features--lets take a look! New in this version is Pixel Precise Positioning and Layering, making it possible to place your graphics and text exactly where you want them on the page with absolute and relative positioning--solving one of our main gripes about earlier versions. There are 60 new pre-designed themes that are completely customizable and, finally, your code when imported into FrontPage remains 100% preserved, including Tags, capitalization, and white spaces.
You now have the ability to insert code while in HTML View using simple buttons or drop-down menus: the new Personalized HTML Formatting allows users to decide how they want their code indented, colors of tags, capitalization, and when to use optional tags. There is now a Reveal HTML Tags feature that will allow you to see what tags create certain effects on their pages while in WYSIWYG mode. You can now incorporate Access databases into Web pages and have users add and edit directly from their browsers: the new One-Button Database Publishing feature makes creating and updating a snap. FrontPage 2000 now incorporates a brand new Script Editor along with Pre-Built Web components for quicker Web page development.
Managing web sites along with team building has been made much easier also with FrontPage 2000 with its new site management reports and views. Page View, Nested Subviews, Check In/Check Out, Workflow Reports, Category Components, and Target Specific Browsers have all been added to make FrontPage 2000 truly team oriented. The similarities of FrontPage to Office 2000 along with the ability to work seamlessly with all of Office saves lots of time and a shorter learning curve. Personalized Menus, and Toolbars will reduce screen clutter while giving the option to customize them just like the new Word makes life a lot easier. To quickly apply formatting from one text item to another, a new Format Painter has been added and to make sure that those words are what they should be there is a new Background Spell Checker.
A new HTML help feature has been added so that you can see help while you are working without stopping in the middle of your development. Ever need help but just not know exactly how to ask for it in technical terms? Well don't fret because an Answer Wizard has been added which lets you use natural language to get the answers. These are just a few of the many new features and improvements that have been added to FrontPage 2000 and as you can see much thought and a lot of listening has be done to push this application to the next level.
The Good and the Bad Earlier versions of FrontPage have always taken a back seat to other Web development programs. One feature that was frustrating was the way the code was written it replaced blank space and proprietary code that was written into the page. Those days are over for FrontPage with this release allowing 100% code integrity when importing from other applications or notepad. Another nice improvement is the ability for FrontPage 2000 to publish anywhere whether it is an ISP with the FrontPage Server Extensions loaded or not, by using its built-in FTP support.
We have talked about the seamless integration with other office programs but to illustrate just how seamless it really is, here's an example: you can import from Word or Publisher in a snap or post directly to the Web from within Word 2000. We truly loved the new Check In/Check Out feature which really comes in handy when you are working a group project on a LAN or Network and don't want to duplicate work.
There were a few things that we weren't quite comfortable with, one of which was how FrontPage copies and moves around files and links without warning. We were working with a file when it seemed to disappear right before our eyes--what had really happened was that FrontPage had moved the file to the proper directory for posting to the Web server. This can be a great feature but can also cause some concern when you don't expect it to happen. Also, redesigning a page that has already been completed with layers was tricky. We wanted to move some images around on the page but found this to be a real chore and placing the images exactly where we wanted, problematic. Publishing and importing large Web sites took a long time to accomplish and because the Web site was set up with permissions we were constantly asked for a user name and access password to import certain parts of the site. This would be so much easier if you could enter this information once and have it applied throughout the operation for a real hands off import or upload. Hello? Microsoft--listening?
How Does It All Stack Up? FrontPage 2000 is a great value for the dollar and at $150.00 stand alone is very competitive with many other Web development software packages available today. Real competition comes from programs such as NetObjects Fusion 5.0, DreamWeaver 4.0, UltraDev 4.0, and Allaire HomeSite to name a few. FrontPage 2000 holds its own with many of these but lacks some advance features found in them as well. We found that advanced code integration was lacking still but not as badly as previous versions of FrontPage did. For the money and the many new improvements and integration, you just can't go wrong with this one. FrontPage 2000 should appeal to the novice as well as the seasoned veteran.
