Since switching to FrontPage for both creation and maintenance of the site from a simple text editor to create the HTML code and an FTP program to upload the pages to the web server, I could never think of doing it any other way. Moving up to FrontPage 98 has just made the job a little smoother.

FrontPage is made up of two main applications: FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor. FP Editor is used to create the HTML pages that make up your site, and FP Explorer displays the site you have created in either a folder view or a hyperlink view. A screen shot of the hyperlink view of part of the TPCUG Web site is above. The whole site could not be presented in hyperlink view here since there are over 400 links in the "Links" folder alone.

For the uninformed, a web site on the World Wide Web is simply a collection of files on some computer (called a server) that is connected to the Internet. One of these files is designated as the home page. Within TPCUG this is the file index.htm, which is the HTML file you see when you first go to our site. That is the file labeled Tampa PC Users Group, Inc. on the hyperlink view above. The page labeled Genealogy SIG is the HTML page your browser goes to when you click on the Genealogy hypertext link on our home page.

FP Editor allows you to type in text, format it just as you would in a word processor to the extent the HTML rules allow, insert graphics, insert tables and hypertext links to other files at your site or on the WWW. This is the standard stuff of an HTML editor; however, FP Editor provides for more: It simplifies the process of creating forms like questionnaire or feedback forms and the creation of frames as in the HTML version of the newsletter page at the TPCUG site where the scrollable list of articles appears on the left part of the screen and the article being read on the right. And it allows for a what-you-see-is-what-you-get creation of tables. In general, everything is as much WYSIWYG as possible.

Using FP Editor you are spared the need for knowing HTML, since it is pretty much point and click. It does, however, provide for an HTML view of the page. Unfortunately (from my point of view), this HTML view leaves out all the HTML code used to create any of the special features that FrontPage so easily creates—like themes, shared borders and navigation bars. I suppose Microsoft didn't want anyone messing with their creations. Unfortunately I have found it sometimes necessary to crank up the old text editor and make such changes when things get a little out of kilter.

FrontPage is a unified approach to creating, publishing and maintaining a web site. First, you use the FP Editor to create your home page and all the pages branching off of it; you use FP Explorer in either Folder View or Navigation View to create however many folders you need to contain and organize all of this on your computer. To allow real-time testing, your own Personal Web Server (PWS) software is supplied.

Once you have created your new Microsoft Front Page Web, which is now stored in the PWS directory on your computer, you can test it there and fine tune it. In fact, you can do more there than at most Internet Service Providers (ISP) because FrontPage will have installed the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions at your PWS. These extensions are necessary to utilize the full functionality of FrontPage. With these extensions also on your ISP's server you can create more powerful web sites without bothering your ISP with things like password protection, text searches on the site, and saving form results. The presence of the extensions also allows you to use the Discussion Group Wizard to create a FrontPage web site which is a discussion group like the one at the TPCUG site. You also get hit counters for free.

After you have your FP web created, you are ready to put it on the Internet for the world to see. In a perfect world, you would simply choose the option to publish your FrontPage web, and FrontPage would handle all the details of dialing up your ISP and transmitting all of your files to the proper place at the ISP, keeping the structure intact just as it was on the PWS on your computer. As you know, the world is not perfect, and most likely your ISP will not be supporting the FrontPage Server Extensions for the free home pages they provide you for your $20 each month. For this you will have to buy one of their upgraded service plans. The server at the TPCUG site does support the extensions, and that makes publishing only the updated pages each time as simple as one click of the mouse. Couldn't be easier.

If FrontPage detects that the server extensions are not supported, it invokes its Publishing Wizard to create a web site for you at your ISP without the extra functionality that you would have if the server extensions were available. In this case, you would have no free discussion group or hit counter, for example.

So what is new in FrontPage 98? First, they have made it much easier to edit your site off line. For some reason, many of us had problems in getting FP 97 to function well when not connected to the Internet. That problem is now solved. Also, now when you delete a file on your local site and then publish, FP asks if you want to also delete the file from the remote site. Previously you had to do this manually.

I should comment that once your site is set up, one very valuable tool is the hyperlink check. As I have noted, on our links page alone we have over 400 hyperlinks to other sites. Checking each of these manually would be a big job. With FrontPage, one click starts the process; when it is finished (a fair length of time later), I have a list of sites with potential problems, meaning that they didn’t respond in a certain length of time.

As for new features, they have added many more themes, which get you up and running with a stylish site fast. This is something I have found no use for; I like to create my own "theme"--tacky though it may be. You can now make all your pages have shared borders or navigation bars to give a consistent look to your site—something the TPCUG site lacks. So, you see, even though I think a lot of the program I haven’t bought into all the new features which mainly affect the appearance of a site. Additionally you can now easily create hover buttons (move your mouse over them and they change appearance). Now, I might add a few of those.

Like any program, the more you work with it the easier it gets. I have been using it for so long that most everything is second nature. I have noted, though, that beginning users often complain (on the Usenet newsgroup microsoft.public.frontpage.client that they get a little lost when they venture away from simple page creation in FP Editor to the actual publishing and maintenance of their web.

The local price is about $50 for the upgrade and $140 for full version. u