Front Page or what?

have used front page but now....

[yorkshirelad]

Hi some input here would be great.

Background - I've been involved in web design for about 12 months. My work has been geared towards making websites work i.e. - good clean design, fast loading, customer focused content and interaction, optimising for search engines plus utilising other traffic generating methods. Up to now I have been using Front Page 2000 in conjunction with purchasing good quality web templates, it does a good job for me and I find it easy to use.

My question is this -

I have now started to attract a couple of larger projects, which while I feel very confident about them, should I consider moving from Front Page to another application? I don't need full multimedia and dislike the delays and inconvenience of Flash etc.

One of the companies I am talking to have in-house designers that aren't doing the business i.e. The sites may look fancy but they are not working. As I am effectively competing with these guys does the fact that I am using Front Page rather than Dreamweaver etc. lower my credibility?

I would appreciate any views. Is this a bit of snobbery on their part or are there genuine advantages of using other applications? One of the best aspects about Front Page is that it is a full WYSIWYG programme. Are there others out there or is the option standard HTML coding which I can do put find it a pain?

One of the sites could end up pretty large, and could move to a portal format.

Thanks for your feedback.

[pageoneresults]

Hello yorkshirelad, welcome to Webmaster World!

Being an avid FP user since 1996, I'm going to suggest that you research alternatives. If you understand html and css, FP can be a powerful tool in building and maintaining a large site. I've never done anything larger than 250 static html pages so I cannot expound beyond that.

Yes, there is some snobbery going on, but that is to be expected. Its an MS product and has been abused by many who did not understand what the program was doing when they clicked on one of the many WYSIWYG functions.

If you can design, if you understand html, and if you can find your away around the backside of the program (which few do), you'll be that much further ahead.

Good luck!

P.S. I use it daily to manage a variety of sites both static and dynamic. Its performed without fail. There is the inevitable hiccup with FP extensions, but there are bound to be hiccups with any program. They can easily be corrected in most cases. ;)

[yorkshirelad]

Thanks for your input - I'm not sure if I have misread your message are you suggesting that I stick with Front Page or experiment with alternatives? 250 pages at this stage would seem a pretty good limit for me to bear in mind.

With regard to the snobbery if I like the application - is there any way of disguising the fact that the website has been created using Front Page i.e. removing the references to it?

Thanks

[Woz]

Can't speak for P1R but I think he as saying, as would I, stick with FP and look around for information on using it effectively. There are a few thread on using FP to the fullist and P1R has some great ideas in them Do a search on Front Page and see what you come up with.

>snobbery
Used to really annoy me at first the way some people put you in a particular box simply because of your choice of tool. These days I have developed selective hearing.

>removing the references to it?

Have a look at the Jimco Addins [jimcoaddins.com] site, he has, amongst many others, an addin to automatically strip out the FP tags.

Onya
Woz

[yorkshirelad]

Appreciate your comments Woz - I will take a look at the Jimco Addins site.

Thanks

[KamaTEQ]

You may want to consider .NET (Such as VB.NET) to create a web site. It might be an overkill if you only have static pages, but it really acts as the bigger brother of FP and can use the FP plugin on IIS servers.

[europeforvisitors]

Being an avid FP user since 1996, I'm going to suggest that you research alternatives. If you understand html and css, FP can be a powerful tool in building and maintaining a large site. I've never done anything larger than 250 static html pages so I cannot expound beyond that.

I have a Web with nearly 3,000 pages that I maintain with FrontPage. I've found that, for the sake of convenience, it's best to break a large Web into smaller units of no more than 500 pages each. For example, if you had a Web on Widgets, you could convert the major subdirectory folders to "Subwebs." In other words:

Widgets
- Red Widgets
- Blue Widgets
- Green Widgets

This would have several advantages over keeping everything in a single Web:

1) You'd enjoy faster saves when saving elements such as shared borders or include files.

2) You'd be able to use different shared borders (e.g., for navigation links) in each Subweb.

3) You wouldn't get spurious error messages when publishing the Web(s). (FP often seems to time out after publishing a large Web with several thousand pages. In reality, the Web publishes just fine, but it's annoying to wait and wait for the false timeout error message.)

Now let's talk about the issue of whether FrontPage is a good tool for commercial Web design. It is *if* your clients trust you to deliver a finished product and don't want to maintain the pages themselves--which is likely to be the case with very small businesses.

If you're working for larger clients, however--or if you're freelancing for a design studio--Dreamweaver is likely to be a better choice since it allows you to use different HTML stylesheets for different clients. In other words, if a design studio or corporate client wants body text to be indented two spaces, tags to be in ALL CAPS, or whatever, you can set up an HTML stylesheet that ensures compliance with the client's standards. (Note: In referring to "HTML stylesheets," I'm not talking about "cascading stylesheets"--I'm referring to the internal stylesheets that Dreamweaver uses to control the appearance of HTML code.)

[pageoneresults]

> I'm referring to the internal stylesheets that Dreamweaver uses to control the appearance of HTML code.

FP has this feature too. Its in the...

Tools > Page Options > HTML Source

Never used the publish feature of FP and have seen many topics surrounding issues with this. I perform everything live via IE and then FTP a copy to my local machine for backup.

I haven't found a client yet who could perform their own edits and not screw something up. In those rare cases where they want to edit, then a CMS (Content Management System) is probably the best option. Since we perform all edits within 24 hours or less, usually within an hour, there has been no need to let them experiment on their web!

[yorkshirelad]

Thanks for your excellent comments. I've had a look at the EuropeforVisitors site and its conforting to know that you maintain that site with over 2,500 pages with FP.

Appreciate the thoughts on Dreamweaver also, I think I will consider that application but in the meantime will continue with Front Page.

Thanks to you both

Mike

[yorkshirelad]

Hi P1R

Could you recommend a CMS (Contact Management System? I would appreciate that. I think I may well need one.

Many thanks

Mike

[brotherhood of LAN]

Could you recommend a CMS (Contact Management System? I would appreciate that. I think I may well need one.

Microsoft Frontpage ;)

Make some templates and then go dynamic. CSS, a couple of templates and a database interface for you doing edits online. It's not hard to set-up. If you are OK with editing your code, FP is immaterial to the cause IMHO.....just maybe when you have perfected your code make sure FP does not un-perfect it :)