Laisha - 5:28 am on Mar 24, 2001 (gmt 0)

I have a client who uses FP98. She makes changes daily. She is also 70 years old, and is not about to try to learn HTML or anything complicated. She has a site that is an auxilary business to her 10-year old mail order catalogue. FP serves her purposes quite well.

My own personal opinions of her choice in software are not relevant. She does not hire me to design or maintain the site. She hired me to optimize the site for search engines.

>I vaguely remember reading somewhere that one possible solution would be to generate the site in FrontPage and then go into each page with a text editor to insert the proper titles.

In my experience, this will backfire in the long run, and may even be part of the current problem. When you try to use a non-FP method to make changes, FP tried to resolve the "html" back to what it uses. You can imagine the mess that results after repeated attempts to modify using non-FP.

It also uses those extension thingies, which are unique to FP, and they get screwed up if you try to use another editor.

>Big problem we're having is that the page titles I'm using for optimization come up as text in the navigation buttons... a nasty surprise. Any way around this?

I had a similar thing happen to me, which is why I was able to write the above paragraph. It just so happens I still have the old (bad) version on my drive. The font tags ended up looking like this:

<font color="#000080" face="Arial">Visa  ·  Mastercard  · 
Discover  ·  American Express<font FACE="Arial" vehicle bras for cars, trucks, suvs</font SIZE="3">  ·  Visa Check Cards</font></small> <small> </small></font>

The solution that worked for me? I fixed all 4000+ instances of this mess in FP98 and then re-imported it in a newer version. Then I bought a Dummies book about Front Page and never, ever tried to change their site outside of that environment.

I don't know if it would have worked had I imported it to a clean FP98 or not, so I don't know if this will actually help you.