Web Page and Site Maintenance Tools

Microsoft Front Page

• FrontPage Editor

for Web page creation

• FrontPage Explorer

for site administration

• FrontPage Personal Web Server to locally test forms and links on your Web site

Front Page Editor

Pros:

• Has notion of a "Web of pages" that you store in a directory on your local machine; Web can be copied to or from a server
• WYSIWYG table editing.
• Allows creation of
• image maps
• forms
• frames
• You can add attributes to any HTML tag
• Comes with page templates; allows creation of custom templates for your page style
• 'Bots' [robots]: FrontPage server extensions (available free for most servers) to
• Insert date/time page was last edited
• Add annotation that can only be seen from editor (not browser)
• Echo data entered into a form field (i.e., for confirmation page)
• Add non-standard HTML to a page
• Include content of another page (very useful to include navigation bar, etc. on all pages in your Web site)
• Insert "scheduled image" or "scheduled include [text]": Image or text is not displayed after expiration time
• Insert a "search bot": a form that invokes a search engine of all pages in your Web.
• Replace "substitution bot" with value of a Web or page configuration variable.
• Inserts a table-of-contents list that is updated whenever Web's contents changes.
• Ability to put form field input into a variety of text file formats (e.g., for a database) so that you can do simple form processing without writing CGI scripts.
• Distinguishes file name from URL.
• Auto update of links in documents:
• If you modify URL of one page in your Web, links and Bots in all other pages in your Web are updated to use that URL.
• If you rename or move any file, links and Bots from other pages in your Web are updated.
• Auto verification of links - both local to pages within your Web and (optionally) remote to rest of Internet.
• Allows insertion of another HTML, text, or RTF document into document you're editing.
• Back and Forward buttons let you cycle through history of pages you've edited.
• Link to a "todo" list of tasks you must do to your Web site.
• Allows insertion of special HTML characters from a graphical window.
• Spell checker

Cons:

• Must have front page extensions installed on server to use bots, and to copy Web of pages to/from Web server. However free extensions are available for most Web servers.
• No font family support
• Unusual naming convention used: calls an anchor a "bookmark"

Front Page Explorer

Pros:

• You can open a Web, either locally or from a remote server:
• Graphical "link view" of your Web site, as shown in picture above.
• Various commands in above view to expose, hide pages and link types.
• You can also change link view to a summary view:
• Automatically launches a local Web server when started, so you can use whatever browser you wish to review your pages as you develop them.
• Can display administrative iinformation about Web:
• Creation, mod date
• Who created Web
• Web size (very useful when copying a Web to your laptop over a modem!)
• Allows rudimentary administration of created Webs:
• userid and password protection, so multiple developers don't interfere with each other, or to restrict who can modify a certain Web
• inerface for password changing
• can apply .htaccess type access restrictions to a local Web (e.g., access allowed only to certan IP addresses)

Cons:

• Remote Webs can only be accessed if they have the free FrontPage server extensions.