Content Management Systems Replacing HTML Editors

Perhaps even more popular than the WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) HTML Editors like Dreamweaver, are the extremely user-friendly content manage systems such as WordPress. In fact the popularity of WordPress as a website management solution has exploded over the past couple of years and has easily surpassed all of it’s competitors. Unlike HTML editors, content management systems let even the most novice users set up professional websites with little to no experience in website design. Absolutely no coding skill is required and the user can even create custom pages using a graphical interface and preset designs called themes. These themes give you the ability to create a website in just minutes that appears to have taken hours.

Control Panel Applications

Another type of internet technology that is making Frontpage web hosting obsolete is the ever expanding selection of control panel applications that enhance the overall functionality and even search engine optimization of a website. Most control panels even include easy installation software that helps you install these applications with ease. The aforementioned WordPress content management system is often included for free with a web hosting account, and this may be one of the reasons why so many people take advantage of Wordpress.

How Long Will Frontpage Hosting Last?

After realizing just how much the popularity of Frontpage hosting has declined in the past couple of years, the question is not “Which is better – a CMS or Frontpage,” rather the question is “How long will Frontpage Hosting last?” At this rate, since Microsoft has stopped developing Frontpage, the service might as well already be extinct. This isn’t to say that some old school users won’t find it useful, however the software is now retired and does not have a use any more in the general public. In fact, it is even difficult to find a web hosting company that uses Frontpage compatibility as one of its selling points. Of course, you can still use Frontpage to create sites with whatever hosting company you’d like to, but the question is why would you want to?

What is the Future of Web Hosting and Site Creation?

As more people venture online to begin their business endeavors, we will undoubtedly see more people looking for simpler solutions to build their own websites. The fact is. Most website owners do not want to take the time to learn HTML or other site coding techniques, so they’d rather use a theme, learn a little bit of CSS and then make a few adjustments to it. This is the mentality that you should expect to see as the web becomes more user-friendly in the years to come.

Why Flash?

Now maintained by Adobe, Flash offers a simple way to enhance the look and feel of almost any website.  Because it is compatible with the FrontPage client and most web browsers, you can incorporate Flash just about anywhere in your site for the benefit of your audience. This means you can liven things up with cool features such as recorded presentations, animation or even movies.  While all users do not appreciate Flash, as long as you keep it to a minimum and use the technology properly, you can make your site standout.

Incorporating Flash

One of the best things about Flash is that pre-made content is widely available on the web for you to use.  If you are simply looking for a quick way to add some flair to your website, this could be the route to take.  Adding Flash to a FrontPage site is fast and easy.

- Open your file in the “Design” view and click the page you want Flash inserted in.

- Next, open the Insert menu and select “Web Component” from the list.

- In the “Component Type” list, choose the “Advanced Controls” option.

- Click on “Flash,” hit “Finish,” open the file you want to add and you are done.

It is really that simple.  FrontPage allows you to automatically install Flash files that end in .spl, .swf and .swt extensions.  Acquiring the Flash files and incorporating them into your website is the easiest way to add some pizazz and keep it updated on a regular basis.  What makes Flash and FrontPage such a great match is that it can be inserted into a specific area of the page, or the entire page.  While the latter requires a little more work, it could be worth it if your truly want a visually appealing, eye-catching website.  If you are an inexperienced web designer, Flash could be the easiest and fastest way to improve a FrontPage site that would otherwise be lacking.

Before deciding to integrate Flash with your FrontPage site, it is important to know that your visitors must have the appropriate plugin in order to play the files you have inserted.  While many users already have this plugin in installed, you may want to create a link that directs them to the Adobe website where they can download and install it for free.

Commercial Software

Commercial CMS products are generally designed for enterprise applications and functionality required by large companies.  These programs usually offer the best overall quality because they are well tested and come with premium support and regular updates for as long as the product is under license.  The major downside is that they can be very expensive, some costing thousands of dollars for a single license.

Hosted Software

Hosted CMS solutions make a great alternative for smaller companies.  This type of software is typically offered in the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) cloud computing environment.  Normally subscription-based, these solutions allow you to enjoy a robust CMS with many of the same features geared towards large companies.  The big drawback to a hosted CMS is that the software cannot be customized to suit your personal needs.  It could also turn out be more expensive depending on how long you end up paying for the service.

Free Alternatives

Free CMS software is a popular choice among users of all sorts, businesses included.  Some of the most widely used programs in this category include Joomla, Drupal and Mambo.  These applications are usually open-source, meaning they can be freely distributed and modified.  The best open-source CMS products are backed by active communities that continuously work to enhance the platform.  Many of these programs have come a long way and received dramatic improvement over the years, making them useful for a wide range of purposes.  The most significant benefit of open-source software is that is can be customized to suit your preference through plugins, themes and flexible APIs.  However, because there is generally no official form of support, you may have a difficult time obtaining help when encountering problems.

Conclusion

It has become clear to see that FrontPage and many other desktop HTML editors are quickly being phased out by their more powerful and capable web-based counterparts.  This is what you will get with almost any CMS solution.  When you take a look at how fast technology evolves, the FrontPage client can be considered a dinosaur compared to some of the other web design tools on the market.  While support can still be found on the market, web hosting providers are increasingly removing FrontPage extensions from their feature list due to that fact that Microsoft no longer backs it.  With a good CMS, you can enjoy a reliable alternative that provides you with the same capabilities of FrontPgae and a lot more.

1.) FrontPage Version

The version of FrontPage on your computer is so crucial because the features vary greatly between editions.  For this reason, you need to make sure the service provider offers the extensions that support your particular version of the FrontPage client.

2.) Additional Features

Although FrontPage support might be your main objective, you will need several more features in order to have a great website and presence.  Some features you may want to keep in mind are email accounts, webmail and web stat tools.  While some versions of FrontPage offer the ability to integrate a hit counter, this feature pales in comparison to what you get with a detailed third-party reporting tool.  If you are building a website to sell products or services from, you certainly need to focus on solutions that come with shopping carts, SSL support and other e-commerce features.

3.) Server Resources

The allocation of resources the host provides is also essential when considering FrontPage hosting.  The resources that are of the most importance to you are disk space and bandwidth.  They are so critical because they ultimately determine how large your site can be and the volume of traffic it is able to support.  Some hosts offers disk space and bandwidth in actual measurements.  For example, one company might have a package that supplies 300 GB disk space and 3000 GB bandwidth.  If you go over these allotments, you may be subject to penalties and additional charges.  You also have firms that simply label their packages as “unlimited,” which usually means that you do not have to pay for any overages.  While both scenarios can work out in your favor, it is imperative to access your resource needs in order to prevent problems with your FrontPage site in the future.

4.) Reliability of the Host

There are literally thousands of companies that offer support for FrontPage.  That does not mean are of equal quality.  Although the actual program is native to the Windows environment, it can also be run efficiently on other platforms such as Unix and various distributions of Linux.  Regardless of the operating system, reliability is of the utmost importance.  This is why it is so critical to find out the company’s background and reputation in the business before purchasing service from them.

5.) The Need for FrontPage

Perhaps the most important factor that needs to be considered is whether or not your really need a FrontPage hosting solution.  This is something you need to think about because there are many other tools that can help you accomplish the same goals and a whole lot more.  You should also know that FrontPage is no longer officially supported by Microsoft and considered outdated compared to modern solutions on the market.

Getting the Most of Both Tools

DreamWeaver is highly regarded as one of the best design tools for just about every project and situation.  In a short amount of time however, Expression Web has proven itself as a worthy competitor.  Although most prefer to choose one or the other, here are reasons why you may want to consider putting both of these tools to work for you based on their strengths and weaknesses:

Extensibility – The Dreamweaver design environment is far more extensible than Expression Web.  In fact, many of the extensions designed for newer versions still work just as well in older versions.  The same cannot be said for Expression Web as most of its extensions must be updated in order to support certain versions.

WYSIWYG – Dreamweaver and Expression Web both have exceptional WYSIWYG design interfaces even though they take different approaches.  Of course, like many such editors, neither display the content exactly how you will see it in a browser, but with all the different browsers and operating systems available today, this is to be expected.  The key is that both are user-friendly and sophisticated with features that allow you to test servers (Dreamweaver) and pages written in ASP.NET or PHP (Expression Web).

Advanced Programming – The area in which Dreamweaver and Expression Web both tower over FrontPage is scripting.  Naturally, Expression Web is an ideal tool for designers who prefer to work with Microsoft technologies such as ASP and ASP.NET while Dreamweaver is better suited for PHP users.  While both offer support for many of the same technologies, they tend to perform better when working with their default language capabilities.

It is difficult to determine a clear-cut winner between Dreamweaver and Expression Web but with FrontPage being shoved out of the picture, you may be forced to pick one in the very near future.  Though incredibly powerful in their own right, one could say that neither is as easy to use as FrontPage since both require you to have a general knowledge of HTML and CSS.  In order to excel with these programs, you need to have a basic understanding of how the web works and the underlying technologies that keep it thriving.  Because neither tool is flawless and has features the other lacks, you may decide to combine their powers and leverage the best of both worlds.   

Notable Improvements

Instead of making several much need changes and introducing another version of FrontPage, the Expression Web software was built from the ground up, making it an entirely different product.  And while there are many similarities between the two clients, beneath the surface you will find that these programs are quite distinct.  Expression Web is more of a professional web design tool, doing away with all the bloated code that resulted in FrontPage being heavily criticized by a sizable portion of its user base.  The web bots responsible for writing code to specifically support Internet Explorer are long gone as full support for other major browsers is now offered.  Not only does Expression Web’s default functionality allow you to write valid XHTML, but it also helps you become familiar with the language by highlighting it in comprehensive code view errors, thus making it a very effective learning tool.

Key Differences

Below are some more examples of how FrontPage and Expression Web are vastly different:

Components – Several of the old components found in FrontPage have been eliminated and are not present in Expression Web.  For example, you will not find components for themes, the navigation view, guest book forms or Word Art to name a few.

Validation Tools – Just because you use Web Expression as your design tool, you should not automatically expect that your code will be clean and valid.  However, unlike FrontPage, this software has a few built in tools to help you check on your code and supports the validation tools provided by the W3C.

Compatibility – The Expression Web software is purposely designed to function with backwards compatibility.  What this essentially means is that sites created with the FrontPage client can be imported into the Expression Web environment and work just as fine.  Keep in mind that it does not support the adding of new content to older FrontPage components.

The web hosting market is slowly but surely giving up FrontPage support in favor of Expression Web.  As a webmaster or designer, you should consider doing so as well.  The software is designed to satisfy the latest web standards having cleaner code and being well tested in a number of widely used browsers.   FrontPage hosting still has better support on the market than Expression Web, but that could all change very soon and when it does, your favorite design tool may no longer be an option.

Why Work Without FrontPage Extensions?

FrontPage extensions work together with a web server to provide functionality that makes the FrontPage product an even more powerful tool.  These extensions are supported by many servers today and are automatically installed with the client program.  Though useful, there are instances where creating a website without them is desirable.  For example, you may want to build a simple website that doesn’t require enhanced functionality.  Another instance would be a server that does not support FrontPage extensions.  When choosing to work without them, you can configure the client to disable features that will not function with the finished website.  By limiting the capabilities of your development environment, you will not have to worry about whether your site will be compatible with the intended web server.

Creating a Disk-Based Website

As the name implies, a disk-based website is a version of your website stored on a disk or removable media.  While you will not get all the functionality as the site based on the server, it tends to be suitable for small scale projects such as this.

In the FrontPage application, after selecting “File”, “New” and “Web” from the menu to create a “New Website”, the “New Dialog” box will prompt you for the location of the website.  If you have a web server such as IIS installed on your computer, FrontPage will choose that location by default.  If not, the default location will be the path on your system designated to store web content.  This path can actually be changed to whatever you prefer.

Setting up a disk-based website is pretty easy as all you are doing is selecting a drive and directory to store your site.  From there, FrontPage will place on the content on the drive you specified.

Limiting FrontPage Features

Because the FrontPage client allows you to convert to FrontPage extensions at any time, you can easily utilize the features that require them to work.  If you do not intend on implementing certain functionality, it would be a good idea to disable these extensions so you do not utilize them by mistake.  This can be done in the FrontPage application by selecting “Page Options” from the “Tools” menu and choosing the “Compatibility” tab from the “Page Options” window.  Under the “Servers” drop-down menu, uncheck the box that reads “Enabled with Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions”.

Summary

FrontPage extensions are designed to make things easier, so you may want to keep this in mind before creating your site without them.  As we mentioned, this option is best for simple sites with limited functionality or a situation where your server does not support the FrontPage client.

What’s Different

Expression Web was designed to be backwards compatible with FrontPage.  This simply means that is supports websites built with the FrontPage client. And while it also sports a similar interface, the one thing you may notice when working with Expression is that it lacks components such as photo galleries and web forms that had become standard in FrontPage.  The reason these elements were left out is because they created code that did not meet W3C standards.  If you have an existing website that contains these elements there is no need to worry as they can still be maintained and modified with the Expression application.  The major difference is that the new software offers numerous tools that let you create the same features in a manner that is more customizable and mostly importantly, W3C compliant.

Expression Benefits

Perhaps the greatest benefit of Expression Web is that it doesn’t require the use of FrontPage server extensions.  The unique advantage is that you can still use the software to update sites created with the server-side technology.  You just will not be able to create new components that require FrontPage extensions.  Another benefit of Expression is that it provides easy access to tools that allow you to edit CSS without any knowledge of Cascade Stye Sheets.  This is similar to how FrontPage provides comprehensive tools that help you manipulate HTML programming.

When looking at it from this angle, you can see that Expression Web certainly offers a level of simplicity that is reminiscent to its predecessor.

The Outlook on FrontPage

In the end, Expression Web is definitely worth switching over to and the transition should be a smooth one for those who are familiar with FrontPage.  While there is a learning curve with some of the new tools, the basics are straightforward and will help you get set up right away.   The more complex tools can be learned along the way and easily implemented when you make updates to your site.

Even though the software is no longer in development, you will have a much easier time finding FrontPage support opposed to Expression Web at the moment.  It has become a popular niche in the web hosting arena and almost everyone offers it.   Just keep in mind that there will probably come a time when FrontPage is phased out altogether. Until then, enjoy.

What is So Special About FrontPage Hosting?

FrontPage web hosting is one that offers support for the popular web design and management software tool developed by Microsoft.  The major draw to this type of hosting is a simplicity that enables virtually anyone to create a great looking website regardless of experience.  FrontPage does not require you to know complex server-side languages such as Microsoft’s ASP or even more basic client-side technologies like HTML.  On the other hand, those who are skilled in HTML programming can benefit tremendously from the ability to add and edit code. These modifications can all be made through a comprehensive interface that caters to the user already familiar with the Microsoft Office environment.

Aside from simplicity, FrontPage hosting also tends to be among the most affordable solutions around.  In fact, this tool has become so popular that it comes included in the majority of the hosting plans on the market, available in both Windows and Unix-like flavors.  Additionally, FrontPage offers a number of features to help build and manage your site.  This includes easy to use drop-down menus, check boxes, radio boxes and instant team websites to support multiple users.  Not to be overlooked is the plethora of pre-designed templates that allow you to instantly change the look of your site along with the web import dialog feature that gives you the ability to connect remote sites.  FrontPage offers advantages for the anyone who wants to create a data-driven site where users can be interconnected in a variety of ways via XML.  This and much more is all made possible through its intuitive WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor.

Finding a FrontPage Solution

When looking at all the benefits, it is clear to see why FrontPage is such a popular offering in the web hosting arena.  If the this is the type of feature you desire, you will first need the Microsoft FrontPage application installed on your computer.  This program usually comes bundled with the Office suite on older versions of the Windows operating system.  Secondly, you will need a host that supports FrontPage through a special set of scripts known as FrontPage Extensions.  Because there are so many hosting providers on the market, finding this type of support shouldn’t be a difficult task at all.  With these vital elements intact, you can have your FrontPage site online in no time.

]]> http://webhostingrating.com/articles/2009/05/establishing-your-web-presence-with-frontpage/feed/ 0 http://webhostingrating.com/articles/2009/03/the-importance-of-frontpage-extensions/ http://webhostingrating.com/articles/2009/03/the-importance-of-frontpage-extensions/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:57:33 +0000 CommunicateBetter http://webhostingrating.com/articles/?p=299 FrontPage extensions are a vital element of FrontPage hosting.  These software modules are installed on a server, enabling the end-user to enjoy the advanced functionality of a website built with the FrontPage application.  If you want to get the most out of this dynamic website publishing and management tool, you will need a web host that has FrontPage extensions installed on their web server.

With FrontPage extensions, you have the ability to effectively administer your site on any computer with the FrontPage client installed.  The machine can have either an internet or intranet connection.  This basically means that a web host with FrontPage extensions installed gives you the luxury to manage your site entirely from the FrontPage application.

The Power of FrontPage Extensions

Some of the capabilities FrontPage extensions offer include:

Easy Management - FrontPage extensions give you a lot of power, including the ability to easily maintain hyperlinks, create navigation bars across all your web pages and automatically format pages for a professional appearance.  Managing a website with FrontPage extensions is fast and simple.

Advanced Administration - One of the great benefits of FrontPage is the administrative power it grants.  You can set permissions for administrators, multiple authors and even your website visitors.  This feature is very useful for the webmaster who wants to trim time off administrative tasks.

Instant Functionality – FrontPage extensions allows you to incorporate a number of interactive features into your site.  This includes hit counters, discussion forums and web forms.  The process of adding these functions is made easy, even for users with limited knowledge in creating dynamic web pages.

FrontPage and FrontPage extensions have introduced simplicity to an environment that is often considered complex.  This type of hosting makes a great option for those with little money and programming knowledge as well as those who don’t want to waste time transferring files to the server.  You don’t have to configure CGI scripts or know how to install third-party scripts on the server.  All you need to do is get familiar with FrontPage, a user-friendly product that caters to the beginner and extends its power to more advanced users.

Don’t Forget to Activate Them!

When signing up for FrontPage hosting, there is one simple administration aspect that must be performed before you get started – you need to activate your FrontPage extensions.  If not, you may find yourself wondering why you can’t upload your website to the server.

While this is a fairly easy task, make sure this information can be found within the hosting provider’s technical support section.  In most cases, activating FrontPage extensions is as simple as logging into your control panel and checking a box that turns them on.  Some web hosting companies require that you send a request via email so an expert technician can take care of it.  Whatever the method, it usually takes about an hour for the server to register the activation.  Taking note of this simple step can save you a lot of time and get your FrontPage site online much faster.