My Recommendations

[Layzie Bone]

These are just a few tips for those who want to make a website.

I like FrontPage myself, if you're used to working with MS Word, then it should be a little easier. I guess I'm a little old fashioned, I dont use FP's way of updating your site, I use FTP, and I advise only using that, otherwise you might get problems with links not wokring.

Dreamweaver, I dont really like, not that it's harder, but it's not exactly drag and drop and things dont always show up on a page as you designed it, although this happens in FP as well time to time.

Along with FP, I use Photoshop for images, and in 5 minutes you can have a fancy looking page. If you plan on making a lot of pages, save a page as a template or name it template and make a copy or two of it incase you forget to do Save As... and accidently click save (overwriting your template).

When naming your files use an underscore instead of spaces. Spaces become "%20" on the internet, underscores "_" are not effected.

There's really not too much to explain other than this, the form feilds, like buttons, menus and such. I think possibly that the server has to have FP Extensions, not sure, i think I'm wrong, but, the buttons you right click them after you have added them to your page and select "Form Feild Properties" and you just type in what the button will say and it's function. What will happen by default is the result (or user input) will be entered in a text file in {server root}/public_html/private/vti-bin.txt or something, you can specify the location and name.

Almost Always use dark backgrounds and light text, much easier to read and not as hard on the eyes.

Don't use fancy fonts, they will show up as Courier on computers that dont have the same fontface.

Compress your images to JPEG, do not use the HTML codes to resize the image, it does not make it use less bandwidth

Be aware that filename.html and filename.htm refer to two different files.

Most servers are case sensitive, even if they aren't use lowercase anyways.

Counters are good, I like to go a step further and be able to get an idea "who" has been visiting my site. I use OneStat, you can visit and get it yourself, it's free, no strings, http://www.onestat.com.

Thats all for now.

[nesman]

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net ... u=internet

Also, go to Maddox's home page and scroll to the very bottom to see his thoughts on Frontpage.

I honestly don't know my way around Frontpage, but people say it's very user friendly. For the most part, I think Dreamweaver is more advanced than Frontpage and produces nicer content if you know how to use it. It also tends to be easier for me to clean up by hand if I need to.

If you want to see a program that produces horrible html, check out Site Studio from http://www.psoft.net . Try the demo then check out your source code.

As far as formmail goes in Frontpage, I've seen it screw itself up so many times and can't really think of a time I've seen it working (WEBBOT--SELF makes me angry). Then again, customers don't call when their stuff is working.

I've been using the cgi formmail from Matts Script Archive for a while, and it's pretty easy to work with.

[battye]

Good post Layzie, and Nes
Moved to Frequently Asked Questions

[Grinch]

I learned on FrontPage as well but I now refuse to use it. FrontPage adds extra crap to the code that is not needed. DreamWeaver is a bit more advanced and produces much cleaner code. But I am to the point now to where I don't really need a WYSIWYG editor, the only reason I use it is for ease of previewing the page.

If you want to test my theory about FP adding extra crap to the code try validating your webpage at http://www.w3schools.com/site/site_validate.asp and see if it passes.

[battye]

I find Frontpage is still good if you want to whip up something in a couple of minutes flat.

[Layzie Bone]

Also, go to Maddox's home page and scroll to the very bottom to see his thoughts on Frontpage.

you mean this little bit?

"This page was made using vi in unix. Anything else is for failures."

[Layzie Bone]

oh an yeah frontpage is user friendly, and you can poop out a page in a fairly quick amount of time. it is great if you know how to code like the back of your hand, not saying I don't know html, but for me to recreate something like "this" page would be very tedious with all the <td>'s and <tr>'s it would be a cluster f*ck.

FrontPage does have some flaws, dont use it for anything other than it's sole purpose, that sychronization crap screws all your links up making you have to redo every hyperlink. I just make the page, save it, and use a ftp client and upload it. That's how my site came to be. And pre-FP days I used, *cough* Microsoft Word. A plain page is already 16K from all the header information. Only advantage you have with word is that it would be harder for people to swipe or directly link your images because you don't get the option of saving them in IE.