Re: is Front Page good for novice?

Pam:

I have been busy with other things and came in on this late.
Still, I was a little disappointed at some of your responses.

The one person who suggested that your friend leave the web
business to the pros and stick to his photography was probably
the one with the best advice. There is a lot more to maintaining
a web site than the "tool" involved.

However, without starting another war about FrontPage, a few
points have to be made to keep at least, SOME objectivity:

In a very real and practical sense, this is EXACTLY the very
thing that FrontPage was designed for. At a recent mall show of
local small businesses a speaker asked for a show of hands of
those business people using FrontPage. A forest of hands went up.
At least 80-85% of those attending. When the obvious question was
then asked--How many were satisfied with it?--very few hands went
down.

Those few who were not satisfied said they needed hands-on help.
When a show of hands was asked for those willing to offer this
help, only a few of us raised our pinkies. (We passed out every
business card we had and now we do more consulting than building
webs.) But--Most of our consulting involves web design, not how
to work FrontPage. Design and structure was where they were
having the trouble !!

FrontPage did not become the most popular web editing program in
the world because it is a piece of junk. No program is ever
perfect but it don't get much easier than FP. The problem that
most people have is "How to build a web site".-- Not how to work
FrontPage. (Just like owning Word does not mean you know how to
write a letter.)

I belong to several discussion lists and believe me--you do not
have nearly as many "basic" questions on a FrontPage list as you
have on this one for example. (Table structure, closing tags,
browser compatibility, etc. etc.) FrontPage does most of it for
you. True--you can force FP to build a poorly designed site but
that is the fault of the designer, not the software.

Example: A Marquee will not work in Netscape whether you coded it
by hand or clicked with a mouse in FP.

If your friend's site happens to be using the FP Extensions, then
using something else will involve a major re-structuring of the
site and links. And even though I use FTP to upload my pages, I
will readily admit there is a lot more work involved than letting
FrontPage do the work for me.

A 45 day trial version was mentioned and might be a good idea.
Hopefully, your friend may change his mind when he sees the work
involved. After all--just one photo session should pay for his
web maintenance for some time.

Good luck with his choice
Ted Temer
Temercraft Designs Redding, CA
temer(at)c-zone.net
http://www.temercraft.com
http://www.newsredding.com/


>I have a photographer friend who last year traded with a local
computer
>company, pics for a web site. They made his site with Front Page
and
>posted it on their own server. He emailed me the other day
asking about
>FP, since he wants to take over maintaining and promoting  his
site.
>
>This guy knows next to nothing about web techologies (or even
computers,
>afaik) and does not particularly want to know - nor is he able
to spend
>much money on it. Is Front Page the best route for him? Can he
get a
>version of it free somewhere?
>
>Thanks for any help you can give.
>
>--
>Pam Shorey
>palema(at)downcity.net
>
>

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