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To develop your web site, you'll need FrontPage, which runs on your PC,
and allows you to save your web pages to the web server, the one you are using
through your web hosting service. FrontPage costs a hundred bucks or so,
and offers many features, the most useful of which are
There are many more features, but in my opinion they're not all that useful. For example, FrontPage provides form validation without programming, but it's not nearly as good as the work you can do yourself (with the help of examples from this web site) in JavaScript. Database access is provided by FrontPage, but its features are limited compared to your own ASP programming. FrontPage also provides nifty tools such as counters, marquees, and hover buttons, but these, too, can be done much better "manually".
Wysiwyg means "what you see is what you get". That means you see how your web page looks as you create it. FrontPage has an excellent wysiwyg editor that supports all the basic features of HTML, including fonts, headers, lists, tables, and forms. Then after you create these things, you can easily switch to "HTML view" and see the code that was generated. You can tweak the HTML, then switch back to "normal" (wysiwyg) view, and make further changes if you like. If you want to add programming, such as writing a little program to be executed on the browser when a certain button is clicked, the HTML view can be used for that purpose.
The page background, headers, bullet formats, navigation bars, and text font are supplied automatically by FrontPage. If you want to change it, you need only apply a new theme. If you feel adventurous, you can create your own theme.
Shared borders are sections (top, left, bottom, or right) that are shared by every page of your web. This web uses a shared top border, which contains the title of the page, a simple navigation bar, and a horizontal rule.
"Navigation bars" are provided in a wide variety of formats. For example, you can use Prev/Next on pages that flow in a sequence, or give a list of "child pages" on pages that introduce a new topic.
To use navigation bars, you must arrange your web pages in a "tree structure", or outline structure -- books, chapters, pages, for example. Then you use the "navigation view" in FrontPage to arrange or rearrange the structure. That view makes it very easy to do -- just drag and drop the pages to rearrange the structure. Whenever the structure changes, all the navigation bars change, too. This is a powerful feature of FrontPage. Just think how many different pages must change when you add just one page. The "parent" page must list its new child in the correct order. The "previous" page must list the new page as its next. The "next" page must list the new page as its previous. And the new page must list the parent, previous, and next correctly. Trust me: this feature is a real time-saver.
Another feature, which in my mind is closely related to navigation, is link-checking. All links, whether internal or external, can be checked for validity. After running this check (and fixing any problems it finds) you can be confident your web has no broken links.
FrontPage provides special objects that you can drop into any page: Table of Contents, and Search. I list them here because they have the potential to be quite valuable, however they are not without significant problems in the current FrontPage implementations.
The Table of Contents starts from a given page, and draws a tree structure of what "it thinks" is the structure of your web page. The problem here is that it doesn't use the navigation view, which would be an excellent way to know the tree structure. Instead it divines the structure from the links in the text. If you rely on navigation bars to provide the links between pages, the Table of Contents won't see those.
The Search finds text in the web, and generates a page of results that has links to all the pages where the word was found. But this page is prone to errors caused when pages are edited. The fix is to click "Tools" and "Recalculate Hyperlinks" after every editing session, which is a bit of a pain as far as I'm concerned.
The final analysis: Table of Contents and Search are features that have potential but are not ready for general use in FrontPage 2000.
Using FrontPage, there is a "folder view" that works just like Windows Explorer. Open a web, click on a file, and begin editing. It's that simple. As I mentioned before, there's also a "navigation view" that lets you move pages around in the tree structure just by dragging and dropping them. You can also develop a web on your PC, then "publish" it to the server. There are pros and cons to each approach.
If you have a slow internet connection, editing on the server is very efficient. Even if your connection is fast, the "turnaround time" between making a change, and then browsing to that change to try it out is very quick. But you run the risk that a "work in progress" will be seen by the Internet browsing public. To guard against this, it is a good idea to create new pages as "unlinked" -- that is, not part of the navigation tree structure -- until you're ready to include them in the web. That way people won't stumble over them until they're done.
The webmaster and author of this Math Help site is Graeme McRae.