Review: A Web page authoring winner

With FrontPage 98, which ships this week, Microsoft Corp. is going to drive a number of companies out of the Web software development business – not because of anticompetitive practices, but because the product contains just about every tool you need to create professional-looking, thematically rich Web sites.

One component, FrontPage Editor, offers graphical tools for creating forms, tables and frames. It gives you access to the underlying HTML code and lets you preview a page without leaving the editor. New in this release are active elements such as hover buttons, which let you apply multimedia effects when the mouse moves over a button, and a banner ad manager. These Java applets can add zip to your pages, as can new dynamic HTML animations for automatically moving objects on a page.

Above the editor, FrontPage Explorer provides a host of site management tools, including link checking, graphical themes and to-do lists, and provides one-button publishing of a whole site or just the changed pages within a site.

For construction of graphics, Microsoft includes Image Composer 1.5, an improvement on Version 1.0 , which was part of the FrontPage 97 Bonus Pack. The biggest enhancement is a button wizard that lets amateurs quickly create attractive buttons and lets experts create dazzling ones.

Disappointing, however, is lukewarm support for cascading style sheets, the new HTML 4 standard for separating the look of Web pages from their content. To create an external style sheet, which puts information about the appearance of pages in a separate file, you’ll have to use an external tool such as Windows Notepad. There’s no graphical user interface (GUI) for style sheets as there is for other HTML pages.

Internal style sheets get slightly more support, but this still seems to be an afterthought.

Likewise, Microsoft could do better with meta variables, which are comments primarily used by search engines to determine site content. By default, the product includes a meta variable giving FrontPage 3.0 credit for generating the page. We remove that on principle, but wish we could take it out as a global default. You can add your own meta variables, but you have to know what you’re doing; Microsoft doesn’t show a list of common tags such as “description” and “robots.”

There are similar rough edges with Microsoft Image Composer.

While Image Composer’s button-creation wizard lets you create multiple buttons at one time, it doesn’t give you a chance to set all the options available for buttons, including font style and size, button shape and background fill. That means you’ll likely have to customize your buttons after you create them. If you want to modify them, you must edit each of the individual buttons one at a time.

If you have existing documents you want to publish on the Web, FrontPage can import them, but only if they’re in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or text format. You also can import an HTML file or even a whole site from a folder, FrontPage Web or the Internet.

Like NetObjects, Inc.’s NetObjects Fusion, the Web authoring product that topped our Sept. 8 Buyer’s Guide, FrontPage comes with many themes, which are consistent looks for backgrounds, banners and buttons across multiple pages in a site.

To save authors’ work, Microsoft includes proprietary components, formerly called webbots. Components are dynamic objects the server can process when a page is called. They let you easily include a hit counter on a page and automatically insert the date a page was last updated. Com-ponents are not standard HTML, however. If you choose to use them, you must be sure that the Web server that’s hosting your pages installs Microsoft’s FrontPage extensions. You can pull information from an Open Database Connectivity database via the Active Server Pages of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server. You must, however, manually enter SQL code or paste it from your database application – there’s no GUI or wizard for building queries.

Publishing your site is easy with the help of a wizard to ask for an ID, password and location on a File Transfer Protocol site. But if you get the location wrong, you can’t correct it yourself – you have to delete the site information and enter it all again.

We had a couple of other bones to pick with the product. HTML frames let you show multiple windows on a single page, but some older browsers can’t view frame pages. The FrontPage Editor’s frame-creation tools let you specify code to be displayed by these nonframe browsers but don’t let you preview the nonframe version.

Also annoying was that FrontPage Editor wouldn’t let us save the custom arrangement of multiple toolbars on our screen.

We found we could live with these flaws in return for the numerous advantages FrontPage offers. If you need to create a departmental Web site with more than one page and maintain it more frequently than once a month, Microsoft FrontPage is an investment that will pay off for you and the people who browse your site.