FrontPage is Microsoft's web site development environment. I have mixed emotions about FrontPage. It's very easy to use, but it also has some quirks about it that can be troublesome. Still, it
is a solid tool for making a quality web site in a short period of time. I have done work in intranet environments where FrontPage has served me well in terms of on-going maintenance. FrontPage's strongest
abilities are also its biggest pitfalls, though. The program's database capabilities are neat, allowing the user to do some advanced data query and report pages without knowing a lot of programming. The catch is that
the pages generated by FrontPage will only run on a server which has the server-side extensions properly installed, so they are not very portable. In a company intranet environment, this is not a problem, but it can be
for a public web service. Much as I have become a convert to NetObjects Fusion as well as just coding pages directly, FrontPage is a powerful tool that is getting more and more popular, so I will always keep up
develop a site or two with it to keep sharp |