Microsoft FrontPage 98

Microsoft Corp.
Requires: Win 95 with 8 MB of RAM or Win NT Workstation with 16 MB and 30 MB of hard disk space and a CD drive.
Street Price: about $140

Reviewed by Jerry Lawson

In giving FrontPage their Editor’s Choice Award, PC Magazine’s editors gushed:

FrontPage offers unequaled ease of use [and] surpasses all rivals in its ability to create complex, interactive Web sites with just a few mouse clicks...no other program lets you create a Web site with the same depth of automation, consistency, and convenience as FrontPage!

Does FrontPage live up to the praise from PC Magazine and many other critics? For the most part, yes. While far from being perfect, this package combines fairly high levels of power and ease of use with some unique strengths. There is no other package quite like this on the market.

Microsoft acquired the rights to FrontPage from a company named Vermeer, and has upgraded an already strong product significantly. The HTML editing/conversion features in Office 97, and, even more so, in MS Publisher 98, are strong enough for many users. FrontPage’s market niche is those developing larger sites. A Macintosh version of Frontpage is under development. The program is so popular that there are a wide range of books about it from third party developers.

I refer to FrontPage as a "package" to stress that it is not merely another in the long list of HTML editors. The heart of the package is a site management program with graphic views of a site and its links. This will automatically check all a site's internal and external hypertext links. Further, when you find a broken link, you can fix it once, and the repair will be good on all pages that had the broken link. A multi-file spell checker is another nice feature.

FrontPage includes a superior graphic HTML editor with some excellent features. My favorite is a "Preview" function that lets you choose not just from different browser programs, but also different screen resolutions. This is invaluable in letting you see how your pages will look to visitors using different hardware as well as different browsers. It also has an excellent Tables editor. The Forms editing features are weak by comparison.

Other components include an image editor, a "publishing Wizard" to facilitate transfer of the files to a web server, a personal web server (this lets you test interactive features even without loading the pages you are designing to a web server), and copies of the ubiquitous Internet Explorer web browser and the decent Internet Mail and News program.

One of the biggest strengths of the program, and the one that makes it unique on the market at this time, is the ability to easily add interactive features like discussion groups or password protected pages. In the past, such features have required the use of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts. Most web site design is more like simple desktop publishing than computer programming, but CGI scripts are indeed real computer programming, hopelessly beyond the ability of the ordinary home page designer.

FrontPage is significant because it lets even novice web site designers add interactive features with no CGI programming. This is a fantastic feature, but as you might imagine, there is a catch. The FrontPage interactive features won’t work except on a server that has something called the "FrontPage Server Extensions" installed. This is free from Microsoft, but the web site host must install it. A few hundred ISPs have installed the Server Extensions as of the writing. You can get a hyperlinked list of them from:

http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/

My biggest gripe about the program is that Microsoft makes it unnecessarily difficult for novice designers to tell which special features require the extensions and which ones don't. The manual for FrontPage 97 had a handy chart that summarized all this information. This chart was omitted from the manul for FrontPage 98. This is a major handicap.

FrontPage has some other problems as well. The most noticeable is speed of operation. MS says the product will run on a 486 with 8 MB of RAM. This estimate must assume you are very, very patient. The product runs slow enough to be annoying on a Pentium 100 with 24 MB; I’d hate to try it with anything less.

The "Image Composer" program included looked as if it had some interesting features, and was designed with creating World Wide Web images in mind, something that can’t be said of many other image editors on the market. Unfortunately, the program seems to be relatively hard to learn to use, and despite a fair amount of graphics experience, I repeatedly had difficulty getting it to perform even simple tasks.

FrontPage allows you to do a multi-file search and replace of the text of your web pages, but unfortunately, unlike competitor Hot Dog, it does not allow you to do the same through the underlying HTML markup.

Despite the problems, I recommend this product. It will be very useful to those using powerful computers who are responsible for designing or managing large web sites. The included templates and Wizards make it an attractive choice for those without powerful computers who only need to set up a few simple web sites with minimum hassle. Perhaps the biggest FrontPage benefit is that if you can use a web server with the FrontPage Extensions installed, you can make your web site interactive almost effortlessly.