FrontPage Beginners - Newbie's

The most common mistakes new users of FrontPage experience.
The most common questions new users of FrontPage experience.
What features should be avoided for "public" web sites.

The most common mistakes new users of FrontPage experience.

No proper site structure. New users tend to build websites that have no real structure and no consistent navigation. The also have many page errors.

To avoid this trap, play around with FrontPage first, learn and get familiar with it. Read: What features should be avoided for "public" web sites. Never test or play around with your production website. When you need to experiment use a test web. Then draw a plan out on paper of:
1. How/what type of navigation.
  Draw a navigation tree. Include some sort of way to update navigation site-wide. The last thing you want to do is edit every page every time you change a navigation link.
  Consider:
  1. Link Bars - easiest - least flexible - creates image links.
  2. Shared Borders - easy, only works on the page borders and occupies the entire border.
  3. Frames - a bit confusing to learn and link. Search engines have a hard time indexing, users cannot bookmark pages easily.
  4. Include Page Component - Most flexible, can add to any part of the page. This is my preferred method.
  5. SSI - Server Side Include - this is a bit of code added to a page in html or code view that include the contents of the specified page on a page. It look like this:
    
    
    or
    
    
    This is fine if never plan on changing the location of the included file, if you do all the pages you have this code on will have to be updated one at a time or with the find and replace. This takes time and is real pain in the ...
    
    Note:
    There are other more advanced ways to add navigation but these are for more experience designers and generally require some level of hand coding.
2. Link Bars, Include Page, Forms, Database Results all require FrontPage Server extensions. If you intend on using FrontPage to build your website, it is wise to make sure your WHP (Web Hosting Provider) has FrontPage Server extensions. These are real time savers.
  
  What are Microsoft FrontPage server extensions?
  
  FrontPage server extensions are a set of server-side applications that:
  1. Let several people collaborate simultaneously on the same Web site and Web Server (multi-user authoring).
  2. Let users write directly to the Web server using a PC or laptop computer from anywhere in the world via the Internet (remote authoring).
  3. Let users include forms on their Web site and specify how the results of those forms are handled.
  4. Let users include discussion Webs on their Web site.
  5. Provide full text search capability on a Web site.
  6. Let users include hit counters on their Web site.
What you want the site to look like.
1. Make sure you know how to do what want to prior to starting the project.
  That means if you want 'that cool graphic" to appear in the right place, learn how to do it first with tables, CCS, avoid absolute positioning layers as this tends to be more advance subject and a difficult concept for a lot of people.
2. Understand word wrapping, tables based on a percentage and pixels and how it ajust to screen size.
Using Themes
1. Themes are great for new uses, they let you create a websites in no time. The are very limiting on customizing what you can do with them, however. These are fine to start with if just want put your basic stuff on the web. If however you want to develop your skills and provide a unique experience to your visitors, start with a professional template or build one yourself.
Word Art and Drawing Tools
1. If this site is just for your own use or you know all of your visitor's will have the latest version of Internet Explorer, then by all means use it. For most "public" (viewable by anyone on the web) websites these features should not be used.
Hover Buttons
1. Tend to be a bit buggy. Windows XP doesn't support Java so visitors without Java will need to have Java installed to see the effect.
Banner Ad Manager
1. Needs Java as well, kind-of misses the point of rotating ads as only one link can be added for all images. There are lots of JavaScript's, Java Applets, Dynamic database driven scripts, ASP, ASP.Net components that do this much better...look around.
  Note:
  Java and JavaScript are 2 different things, JavaScript is almost always acceptable.
Page transitions and DHTML Effects
1. This are pretty cool the first you see them, but if you want your visitors to stay a while on your site avoid them, the get old fast.
Adding JavaScript to an Included page
1. FrontPage doesn't in include any scripts from the head section (code view) from the include page, so you will need to copy the script to the main page in order for the script to execute.
Copy and Paste
1. Microsoft makes it easy to copy and paste from one application to another. This is good for most applications, but it can reek havoc on web pages because all the formatting is also copied. The best thing to do, is to copy and paste into Notepad. This strips the formatting. Then copy from Notepad to FrontPage.
FrontPage works best with ASP and ASP.Net. When looking for advanced dynamic scripts for your site avoid ActiveX, DLLs and any script the requires hand coding. There are plenty out there that fit this bill. www.hotscipts.com www.aspin.com. Most JavaScript's are easy to install, check out Java Script Source.
Always keep a backup copy of your website.
1. Do this particularly when using Shared borders and whenever you make large updates.
Linking to a banner ad
1. When possible copy actual image to your website then link it yourself. This will prevent slow page downloads.

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