Managing Sites on Your Intranet with FrontPage

Creating Web Sites with FrontPage

Microsoft FrontPage 2000 provides a full range of Web authoring tools. You can use FrontPage to do any of the following tasks:

• Create Web pages
• Add dynamic graphics
• Create richly linked Web sites
• Manage and update Web sites

FrontPage also helps you create Web projects faster, because collaboration features allow more than one author to work on a Web site at the same time.

Creating professional-looking Web sites

By using FrontPage, you can create, format, and edit Web pages. The word-processor-style interface makes it easy to add, modify, rearrange, and remove page elements. As you add or modify text, images, tables, forms, and other elements, you view your pages as they appear in a Web browser.

Here’s a small sampling of what you can do with FrontPage to create a Web site:

• Create and design pages quickly.

  You can use one of the built-in templates or wizards to create a Web page, or you can create your own template.

• Add and edit pictures and image maps — pictures you can click.

  You can insert pictures in almost any graphics format. FrontPage converts them into GIF or JPEG format.

• Create links easily.

  You can create links to a page within the same Web site, or you can create links to a file, an e-mail form, or another Web site.

• Apply a built-in theme.

  You can modify built-in themes or create your own. A theme is a set of unified design elements and color schemes that gives pages and navigation bars a consistent look throughout a Web site.

• Create a frames page.

  You can create a frames page with a separate, scrollable page within each frame. A frames page is divided into frames, much like how a window is divided into panes.

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Collaborating with other Web authors

In many organizations, creating a Web site is a team effort. FrontPage allows team members to work on the same Web site without slowing each other down or overwriting each other’s work.

For example, you can use FrontPage to do the following:

• Check in and check out pages.

  You can prevent two or more authors from modifying the same Web page at the same time.

• View the revision history for a Web page.

  You can use the revision history feature to keep a record of all the changes you make to a file.

• Customize and share themes and templates.

  You can use themes and templates to ensure a consistent look among pages of a Web site or even among different Web sites.

• Selectively disable FrontPage features that your Web browser and Web server do not support.

  You can prevent Web authors from inadvertently including nonfunctioning features.

• Customize HTML formatting.

  For example, you can specify the amount of white space between paragraphs, which helps to ensure a consistent look among Web pages.

In short, you can use FrontPage to define the environment in which Web authors work so that they produce professional-quality Web sites efficiently.

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Working with other Office applications

When you install Microsoft Office 2000 Premium, FrontPage is installed with all the other applications. FrontPage supports the Microsoft Office 2000 MultiLanguage Pack, so you can install the entire package in one language and then add other languages as required.

All Office 2000 applications can save documents in HTML format and publish them to the Web. However, FrontPage provides powerful site-management capabilities that you can use on a Web site that any Office 2000 application publishes — if you install Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions on the Web server. And Office users can save Office documents and Web pages to FrontPage-based Web sites as easily as they save files to a hard disk.

HTML is the native format of FrontPage documents, and HTML is becoming the common format for many applications. However, FrontPage is the only Office application that allows you to open an HTML document created in any other Office application, make and save changes (except to pictures created in the original application), and then reopen the file in its original application. You can also convert files from other Office applications to HTML format, edit the files in FrontPage, and then publish them to the Web.

FrontPage features are available to other Office 2000 applications, and Office 2000 application features are available to FrontPage. For example, you can include an Excel 2000 worksheet in a page that you create in FrontPage. Then you can double-click the worksheet in FrontPage to open Excel 2000 and edit the worksheet. After you finish making changes, you just quit Excel.

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Effectively managing Web site content and structure

You use FrontPage to create the structure of a Web site as well as the site’s individual Web pages. The links between pages, called hyperlinks, determine the structure. Often, pages are linked in a hierarchical structure that resembles an organization chart. This hierarchical structure can be many levels deep, and it can contain hundreds, or even thousands, of pages. Usually, such a complex Web site is divided into subwebs.

Keeping track of the links in a moderately sized Web site can be difficult, if not impossible. For example, if each page in a 20-page Web site has only one link to every other page in the site, the site has a total of 380 links. FrontPage keeps track of all the links. If a page is renamed, deleted, or moved to a different folder, FrontPage automatically updates the links to and from that page.

To help you manage Web sites even more effectively, the Reports view shows broken links and orphaned files, which are files that are not linked to any other file. The Reports view also shows new files, old files, and slow pages, which are large pages that take a long time to download.