For anyone really into web design, “frontpage" normally isn't even in the toolbox - dismissed as too inflexible.
And it probably is a bad solution for purist designers etc.
But when you need to churn out a website or two, in quick time, for educational users who are happy, in the first instance, to have something up there, and you don’t want the site to look too primitive, its pretty useful.
- the navigation view is smart. Add, delete or rename an item, and all the menus update themselves. Add a page, and you just drag and drop it onto the nav bar and everything is linked. (it also copes with nesting the nav levels). Saves you managing the links manually.
- the templates are better than my design skills. I know that in saying that, i've declared my design skills as pretty minimal, but having spent a lot of time clunking up a couple of sites, I’ve already accepted that. I like the fact that I can choose a theme, and all the pages update themselves, easy as a powerpoint template. (If I had time, I’d be interested in seeing if a tech person can learn design, but right now isn’t that time)
- You can avoid coding. Just because you know how CSS, dhtml, Javascript, ASP, whatever … do you want to have to go there? – especially when its not your day job.
- You can nearly use it as a dynamic site, if you have only one or two updaters.
Of course there is a price for this convenience – if you want to tweak the rollovers on that nav bar, or customise the colour theme on just one page, for example, then good luck finding it amongst the obscure code that Frontpage generates. But if you’re likely to want to do that, FrontPage probably isn't your web design tool of choice in the first place.
And if you really need multiple people updating the site, then this isn’t going to do the job either. You’ll probably need the whole database driven content route. But in my experience thats heaps more time consuming .. although wikis etc are changing that - and its not what we needed here. .
The reason I’m thinking all this at the moment is we’d been planning to make a site for the Weeroona’s College’s long running involvement in the energy vehicles program (kids racing pedal powered, solar powered, and limited fuel engines) .. and suddenly there was a deadline, since there was an event planned for this weekend, with the domain name blazoned on the vehicles. We had a rough sketch of the menu items, and some content for the intro page, and the rest of the content was sitting in word docs from the event coordinator (John Taylor) in emails from a few days ago. So, on Thursday night I buy the domain name we’d agreed on, buy some shared hosting (all for less then $50 from budget companies over the web) , link them together – and wait overnight while they sync up. (these two companies, by the way, have good online support for this sort of thing)
Friday morning I open the two emails, adjust the site structure for the new items, copy and paste in the content, and with minimal formatting, we have a 10 page site. There’s a couple of placeholder elements, and not enough graphics, but at least if the domain name is blazoned on the cars, there will be something for people to see when they follow it up.
I could also plug in a wordpress blog, like this one, if we want that for dynamic news updates, and there you have it.
I’m not going to be offended if my two hours of work gets scrapped –whereas if I’d even partly coded it by hand, or laboured at a design, I might be a bit miffed to see a few days work getting scrapped. So if this ends up being a prototype of the final site, showing the menu structure and content we need, I don’t mind. And at least the inevitable changes, that always seem to go with site design, are on a pretty flexible platform.
Here’s another 2 hour attempt from a while ago, a health webquest, with the same web template but different colour theme.
No doubt its possible to do something really funky with the "energy vehicles" concept, and I’ll be first to applaud that … but when the alternative is nothing in place, frontpage is cool.
it may end up only be a wireframe for the final site, or it might stay for a while, but I like its flexibility.
Only three three or four hours for a site – which is next to nothing in my experience - built off templates that do the bulk of the work.
Its a bit therapeutic to write this, after some of the hand designed & coded sites i've worked on.
I can cope with a somewhat powerpoint feel, for that investment of time.