FrontPage 2003 Review

1/3/2004; It's been a few months now since I installed FrontPage 2003. I must admit I didn't use it to much at first, just swamped with to many projects to really dig into it. I did read 2 excellent books however during this time.
Update 11-18-2005; I am now using FrontPage 2003 almost exclusively. Some of my clients use Dreamweaver...I have come to dislike Dreamweaver more and more as it is far more difficult to train my clients that want to manager their websites than with my clients that use FrontPage 2003 to manger their websites. I have found that FrontPage 2003 is just as powerful as Dreamweaver and FrontPage is far easier to learn!

Using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 by Paul Colligan and Jim Cheshire. This was first time I read anything from these authors, I did so because I have been using Jim's add-ins (Excellent!) for some time now and thought why not...Not a bad Investment at all! Great Book!

The second book was by Jim Buyens, Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out. I think I've read everything Jim has ever written, so it was no surprise to me that this book lives up to and even surpasses the high standards of his past writings. Excellent Book!!

Anyway, both books are excellent and it wouldn't hurt anyone to read both. If you can only just choice get one, toss a coin.

Last month I decided to get this site at least started, so I resisted the temptation to open my FrontPage 2002 editor and start pumping out pages. Instead I got a new computer (I have found that every time Microsoft upgrades it's software it pays to get the best computing power you can) and Office 2003 with FrontPage 2003. I did have a small problem getting .net up, but I eventually figured it out.
After spending many hours pulling my hair out on this one:
After reinstalling IIS...
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828905
I finally found the simple answer was to run:
"%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis.exe" -i
instead of:
"%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\version 1.1.4322.573\aspnet_regiis.exe" -i

Overall the installations went well and I was creating my first sites in no time.

After a month of playing with the new FrontPage 2003 there are definitely some things I really like and dislike:

Dislike

I am a GUI (Graphical User Interface) junky! I like my icons flat, clear and many of them. I find hard to read the rounded toolbars and colorful icons. This may change over time but right now it's a pain in the but.
The Database Results Wizard (DRW) is pretty much the same as in 2002 for ASP with new features only for ASP.NET and not much at that. Why Microsoft has not added more features to this powerful tool is beyond me? Maybe they want to sell more Visual Studio software. I'm not talking about adding anything more than you can find on www.aspin.com www.hotscripts.com, Asprunner or Aspmaker, it would just be nice if these features where built in. I don't know about the rest of you but I have gotten fairly fast at pumping out ASP scripts and would like reap the rewards for a few years before I move to ASP.Net. I would like to see Microsoft continue to add features for ASP for a little while longer. That said, I know FrontPage is meant to be a web design and management tool, but these days dynamic webs ( at least some portion of a site) are the standard for new sites and FrontPage should be able to do the basics. e.g. Multiple user logins, styles, exports, sorting, email from db connections, etc..
Over the last few years I pretty much got hooked onto the design time "Include Page" feature. I found this to work extremely well unlike the shared borders that almost always cause grief if you do a lot of updating. FrontPage no longer lets you include a .asp or .aspx page on another page. www.websunlimited.com does have an add-in to make this function again but I have found it works only sometimes and always gets the path to the include page wrong when including multiple pages on one page. Anyway, since I pretty much create just about every page as an asp page. I keep this tag handy for including my asp pages:

I use the normal include to get the path, copy then cancel when I get an error. Then I insert the path into the webot comment and I get the my design time include. I thought were moving away from hand coding Microsoft? If you have a lot of includes in your sites they will still work but you can no longer add includes to asp pages.
The biggest problem I have with this program is that it lags on opening and on some commands (behaviors), I don't know about the rest of the world but when I click on or open something I want it to happen yesterday already.
The online help is cool, but makes me hot when my internet connection is slow.
Why can't we record macros like in other Office apps?
No more new features to server extensions, these I believe MS is phasing out, too bad.
FrontPage is Web Design Tool, why no TopStyle like features for CSS?
No Export or Print from Reports.

Like

Ok, now that we have the dislikes out out of the way lets talk about would I like about FrontPage 2003.

First let me start by saying the "Likes" far out way and any "Dislikes".
Love the new publishing interface and features. FTP, Webdav, Synchronize, Remote to local, File system, Optimize.
Layers nice.
Behaviors, very useful.
Table features, I don't believe like so many that tables are on there way out and layers will replace them. I think both will be around for a long time to come.
Code Snippets, very useful.
Tag picker - about time.
Line numbering - again about time.
Interactive buttons, good. Anything but hover buttons!
Trace image, great for placing my sliced images as I almost always use a graphical editor for a mock up of my sites as the first step in design process.
Split view, nice.
DWT - very cool for clients that tend to screw up there site. The only concern I have is this tends to be a lot of my work! Guess I will just have sell more sites or more features instead fixing them!
CSS classes, much needed.
IntelliSence, powerful.
Web parts and SharePoint, great for large sites and intranets.
Better multimedia and Flash support.

One more thing. I know Microsoft is billing this as a major upgrade, but to me a major upgrade would be something I can't live without. I would bill this as as some new features and many long due features.

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