Microsoft FrontPage 2003

Like the other Microsoft Office apps, FrontPage has to be both simple to use and able to deliver high-impact results in short order. Helping to get users off to a good start are a wide range of productivity features, such as pre-made site templates (with wizards guiding you along the way) and professionally designed themes. There's also a Navigation view in which you can visually manage the structure of your site ready to be used as the basis for automatic link bars - though this is an option rather than a central part of the workflow as it is in NetObjects Fusion.

When you turn to the Page view to work on your pages, FrontPage tries to make the experience as similar to working in Word as possible. For example, there's the Draw Table tool for interactively handling layouts plus familiar formatting commands. There's also access to clip-art and reasonable image-based control. You can add impact via JavaScript, including interactivity, such as rollover buttons and expanding menus. FrontPage also provides its own proprietary web components that take advantage of dedicated server extensions to enable users to add impressive features, such as integrated form handling, searches and discussion groups.

FrontPage has always scored highly for its quick results but ultimately the program has seemed underpowered compared to Dreamweaver. No problem: for the 2003 release Microsoft simply set its developers to copy the market leader. This included adding Dreamweaver-style support for CSS-based layered layouts and a Behaviour panel for managing scripted interactivity. Most notably, it involved a complete revamp of FrontPage's coding capabilities, adding a split HTML/Layout view, a Quick Tag Selector, context-sensitive AutoComplete based on HTML and CSS syntax, and tag-based find-and-replace.

You could argue that FrontPage 2003 now offers the best of both worlds, with fast results for beginners and advanced control for experts. In practice, there's still no sound reason for professionals to shift from Dreamweaver, especially as there's a long history of mistrust for Microsoft based on its proprietary leanings (for example, tying sites to its own server solutions) and willingness to take undesirable shortcuts (such as producing pages that only work as expected under Internet Explorer or just on the user's own system). These failings aren't good news for the occasional user either, and FrontPage 2003's attempt to move up market has also inevitably added complexity.