Presentation/Web start page
Web Construction with FrontPage:
General Issues,
Creating/Opening Locally
Opening "Live",
The Editing Environment/Themes,
Fonts and Text Editing,
Whole-page formatting,
Placing Images,
Tables,
Hyperlinks and Menus,
Website Structure, and Publishing your Site,
Classroom uses

Multimedia on the Web:
The Playing Field
Images
Music and Sound
Video
"Fair Use" and Copyright
Streaming on the Web
Image Sources

Multimedia and PowerPoint:
PowerPoint Animations
Sound and Music
Video

The Web Applied:

Elsewhere on this site:
General Instructional Technology
Presentation/Web
Imaging
Sound
Video,
Home

 
Go to Jeffrey L. Jones home page Presentation/Web

FrontPage - General Issues

Microsoft's FrontPage has attempted to give you a familiar environment in which you can create your web page or site, very much like Word or Publisher, or other productivity applications.  It makes the day-to-day maintenance of such pages easy, almost trivial.  However, just as the World Wide Web isn't just like a book, web pages are not just like Word documents, so some care must be taken. In particular . . . 

  • Web pages are not usually sequential.

This is the real revolution of the World Wide Web.  Books and other documents start with page one, and move in a linear fashion to the last page.  The Web provides the ability to instantly jump around, making it possible for the reader to skip to exactly what s/he wants.  You must be mindful of this capability as you construct and connect your pages, and be sure to provide navigational aides, called hyperlinks, to make this possible. As an example, the entire sequence of FrontPage tutorials (as well as the rest of the contents of this website) are listed in the menu structure in the left-hand column of this page as hyperlinks, so you may instantly skip to any part at any time.  Links are also provided within these pages when information is covered elsewhere.

  • Web pages must be universal.

If we knew everyone in the world had a Macintosh computer that was less than 3 years old, then we could simply post our web pages in the latest version of Appleworks and everyone would be happy. But the second revolutionary aspect of the World Wide Web is that it is intended to be viewable by everyone using any computer - any hardware running any operating system. FrontPage takes care of some of this for you automatically, but it doesn't always tell you when you're pushing the limits. Care must be taken especially when converting other documents (such as Word or Publisher pages) into web pages. It is generally a better idea to create your page as a FrontPage document rather than convert from something else. Font selection also pushes this - selected fonts must be resident on the target machine to appear as you created them.  This will not be the case except for the most obvious of fonts.

Universality is also an extremely important issue when your site has things other than text, since sound, video, and image files come in a variety of formats, not all of which are universal.  See "Formats and Codecs" under Video, "Formats" under Imaging, and "Formats" under Sound for a discussion of such issues.

  • Images and other objects must be stored and handled separately.

Although it is possible to cut and paste images into FrontPage, this creates a file separate from the document itself which must be handled separately. This is very different from Word or Publisher, which automatically incorporates all images into the document, and saves them all together in one file. When a new website is created using FrontPage, a folder called "Images" is created - store your images there.  If your website is complex, make subfolders inside the "Images" folder to organize your images. You will be forced by this to learn a bit about files and file structure, but this is a good thing!

  • Web pages are stored as commands.

The universality of the World Wide Web is achieved by using a universally-adapted formatting language called HyperText Markup Language (HTML).  HTML does its work through commands - for example, <br> signals the beginning of a new line.  Not that long ago, everyone intending to construct a web page wrote directly in HTML, and so web developers were computer programmers, in a sense.

FrontPage and its ilk, known collectively as WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") applications, make it possible to avoid the murky world of HTML. However, as your desire to increase the capability of your site, at some point it is a good idea to learn some HTML basics.  FrontPage gives access to the HTML code through a tab at the bottom of the page view. Take a peak, and see if you can figure out what it does!  Good introductions to HTML can be found all over the web.  A few include . . .