Full Review: FrontPage 2002
By Jay Munro ZDNet Reviews
FrontPage: You either love it or hate it. Like the rest of Office XP, the latest version of Microsoft's WYSIWYG Web-authoring tool, FrontPage 2002, is more tightly integrated with Web-based services, particularly SharePoint Team sites, and includes new Web components. But there are other notable new features as well, including PowerPoint-style drawing tools, a tabbed interface for multipage editing, new reporting tools, a publishing wizard that lets you drag and drop to upload files in tandem with FTP clients such as WSFTP or CuteFTP, and a database wizard. FrontPage is still not the right choice for code editing, but at least it now leaves HTML and ASP code unscathed.
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With the addition of the SharePoint Team Services to the Office XP family, FrontPage is the preferred tool for in-house Webmasters, who will use it to customise and brand SharePoint Team sites. The marriage of SharePoint and FrontPage 2002 makes it easy to create discussion boards, online surveys, and browser-editable lists for both Internet and intranet Web sites. With FrontPage 2002, Web designers can open a SharePoint Web (with the proper permissions) and modify page templates easily. (This was possible with FrontPage 2000 as well.) FrontPage has always worked best when you commit to the whole Microsoft regimen, so your Web host will need to upgrade to the new SharePoint extensions.
New Web components (bots) include custom link bars, an instant photo gallery, and automated content from MSN, MSNBC, Expedia, and Microsoft bCentral. News headlines, maps, or stock quotes can be added to your pages. We liked having headlines and maps, but we thought the implementation of the MSN and MSNBC Web components made it too easy for visitors to click through to those sites quickly without looking at the ones we created. We were able to use the new Inline Frames feature, though, to keep users at our site.
If you have a group of images you'd like to publish, the Photo Gallery wizard will let you create a page with thumbnails that your users can click on to bring up the large versions. FrontPage will automatically create the thumbnail images, and you can choose among four different layouts. Since the wizard only creates a single page, your photo gallery is limited to small groups of images, or page performance will suffer. We would have liked to see a way to create multiple pages for large numbers of pictures.
If you aspire to build the next killer e-commerce site, you can add features such as product catalogues, a shopping cart, and credit card services by paying an additional (Price: AU$TBA) per month for a subscription to Microsoft bCentral. You can host on any ISP and still use bCentral's services. We were unable to test the e-commerce wizard as the site was not up at press time, but if it does what Microsoft claims, it may make online store creation easy.
The FrontPage editing environment has undergone a face-lift, with tab-based multiple page views that let you work on several pages at once. Other editors such as Allaire HomeSite and Namo WebEditor have had this feature for years, so it's good to see FrontPage catch up. FrontPage supports Office XP's Smart Tags, but the only one used in the application is the marginally useful tag that brings up options to retain or discard formatting when you paste a document or text into a page.
The new PowerPoint-style drawing tools can give you drop shadows, arrows, shapes (such as speech balloons), and word art without leaving FrontPage. The program converts such graphics into a combination of VML, XML, and images. Though they look great, your users will need to be running a version 5 or later browser in order to view them.
Web authors can take advantage of better Web-site management through integrated usage reporting. You can follow the traffic your site is getting with FrontPage's daily, weekly, and monthly reports, which track hits, referring domains and URLs, and search strings. You can view the reports directly in FrontPage. FrontPage's tracking features can also provide Web content, via seven top-10 lists that can be inserted on pages.
Enhancements to the publishing wizard let you see both the source and destination folders for your site. We liked the new interface that let us publish all our files or just drag one file to be uploaded. Unlike earlier versions of the program, if your hosting service doesn't have the FrontPage Server Extensions or SharePoint, FrontPage 2002 can still publish via the FTP protocol.
Developing a data-based Web site by hand can be tedious and out of reach for beginning Web authors. The new Database Interface Wizard simplifies creating a new database and a site built around it. We liked the option to add a database editor to the site to simplify maintenance. Unfortunately, there isn't much flexibility in using the data, as results are returned as a noneditable bot.
FrontPage has always been WYSIWYG, and this version is no exception. Though you can edit HTML code, there is little that helps you write code manually. FrontPage colour-codes tags, but there's no IntelliSense help or tag matching. For serious code editing, look to Microsoft Visual Interdev or Allaire HomeSite. On the bright side, FrontPage now displays HTML and ASP code correctly without reformatting. FrontPage 2002 lets you enforce XML formatting rules, which make sure tags are closed. But we were perplexed by Microsoft's implementation. Unlike HomeSite 4.5, which automatically inserts a matched tag as you enter the first one, the XML-formatting option in FrontPage only works on existing code, not as you write new code. It's a great way to clean up code, but we wondered why the technology wasn't fully utilised.
FrontPage has always tried to offer a lot of functionality in a package that's easy to use. If you're looking for a code-intensive Web-authoring tool, keep looking. But if you want a simple tool with lots of built-in components for building content quickly, FrontPage 2002 is a good choice.
