Web-site Development Tools

[Michael Squires (michael)]

I have mixed emotions on FrontPage. I use it entensively for brand-new
development (for small, coheasive sub-sites in our corporate digital library)
and I teach a class on web design to high school students. I don't use it on
pages that I'll have joint ownership / maintenance on, or on any pre-existing
pages.

I find it good for sites with 20-50 pages. My experience with larger sites
(I've done a couple of 1,000 page (static) sites, plus lots of dynamic page
creation from databases)) is that FrontPage lacks any thought of "bulk"
editing operations. It doesn't assist you in doing server-side includes. Plus
the site manager (FP Explorer) has a \very/ narrow-minded view of what a
"site" is, making it hard to use on a subtree of a much larger site (we have
200,000+ pages).

Since I've got lots of HTML experience (my other html tool is "vi"!), I
typically just accept the ugly coding that FP does, unless it's getting in my
way. Then I go in by hand and fix it. There are some pages that FP insists on
changing around (incorrectly) - so those I have to put off-limits to FP and
just maintain them by hand.

We've seen some very bad things happen to people who took old, hand-done
pages (typically that they inherited from someone else) and fired up FP on
them. They've gotten wedged and quite often didn't have enough (or any!) HTML
experience to un-wedge them.

So, my typical advice to people is: if you are building a new site that will
be small (< 100 pages) and that will stand alone (not be part of a larger
site), then FP could work very well for you. If your situation doesn't fit
those, then you may run into trouble and end up doing a lot more hand-editing
than you thought that you would.

Michael Lee Squires
Digital Library Champion