Product Reviews

FrontPage's interface will be immediately familiar to anyone who's ever used an Office application such as Word or Excel. The toolbars and icons are familiar-looking, while the main screen is uncluttered with help clearly visible.

The basic concepts behind FrontPage are similar to most other Web design packages - you can create individual pages, either from scratch or from templates, or you can create an entire site (rather confusingly called a 'Web' in FrontPage). Like most Microsoft software these days, FrontPage's interface is very 'task-based', so that when you want to add a new page, you're presented with a list of sensible choices, such as adding a new blank page, creating one based on an existing page, or using a template.

The templates that are available tend to veer towards being functional and adaptable, concerning themselves with page layout rather than including loads of garish colour schemes, as is often

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the case with budget software. Word users in particular will find the way that FrontPage uses templates very familiar.

The main editor is divided up into the standard 'Normal' view, in which you can lay page elements out visually; an HTML view; and a preview view. Using the Normal view is, again, very much like using Word, to the extent that the toolbars are almost identical. Although Word itself can be used to create Web pages, FrontPage produces much more 'pure' HTML that will work on different browsers. This becomes clear when adding pictures to a document - Word enables you to put images wherever you want in a document, and to resize them at will. FrontPage applies the rules of HTML, which mean, for example, that pictures can't appear on top of text.

But FrontPage's main strength lies in its site management tools. FrontPage's 'Webs' make it very easy to set up and maintain whole sites. You can, for example, automatically create shared navigation bars that appear on all new pages. You can also ensure that changes made to a page (such as changing the file name) will be dynamically reflected in all pages linked to it. If your ISP has the relevant extensions installed, FrontPage also makes it very easy to set up things like database connectivity for creating full commercial sites.

What FrontPage lacks when compared to packages such as Macromedia HomeSite is fine control over HTML and scripting. But the code that FrontPage produces is still very standard, and so shouldn't create problems.