| Is it Time to Cut Your FrontPage Extensions?
Like a bad hair style, so to speak, I knew it was time to get rid of my FrontPage extensions when my web hosting company removed them from my hosting accounts. No self-respecting web hosting company would just up and remove FrontPage from the server without notifying its customers, but that's what happened...twice. That's another story and I'm no longer doing business with that company, but it forced me to take a hard look at what I was using for building my web pages. Like many webmasters from the 90's, I cut my teeth on the free version of FrontPage Express packaged with Microsoft Windows. I soon outgrew it and bought the full version and continued to upgrade as new versions came out. When Microsoft decommissioned FrontPage and came out with Expression Web, it was an opportunity to download a free trial of Dreamweaver before making any purchasing decisions for another Microsoft product. When I opened Dreamweaver and that big empty white canvas stared back at me, my initial reaction was, "Now what?" It wasn't intuitive. It doesn't matter to me what the professionals are using if the learning curve is so great that I have to study just to make a simple HTML page. I knew it wasn't the product for me. I used to be a programmer in a former life. While a client may have complicated business rules, the software is supposed to make enforcing those rules easy. After having watched numerous user training sessions, I'd recognize that lost doe-eyed look when a user sat in front the computer and didn't know where to start. That's a feeling I didn't want from any web page builder. On a related note, websites should be easy to used, too. If you're designing websites, a good read on the subject is "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. After the Dreamweaver 2-minute test run, I watched a video tutorial for Expression Web. The video convinced me that Expression Web was easier to use that its predecessor, FrontPage, so I bought it. But one thing remained the same, it still required FrontPage extensions if I wanted to take advantage of its publishing feature or utilize something like Dynamic Web Templates. The extensions are quirky. There were countless times that publishing failed because "FrontPage extensions were not installed", yet they were. That meant a trip to cPanel to uninstall and then reinstall them, shutting down Expression Web, then reopening it and attempting it again. That almost always worked, but beats me what caused it to begin with. My web hosting company told me to use FTP to publish my pages instead of the Expression Web publisher, but without the extensions, I couldn't use Dynamic Web Templates and that bothered me because I'm a firm believer in reusable code. Once again I began my hunt for easy-to-use software and I finally found a product that delivered what I needed. Now I can create slick graphical menus and breadcrumb trail navigation without 3rd software. When I get a burst of new ideas, I can build tons of pages at once, but schedule them for publication as slowly or as quickly as I like. I've always liked that feature in my WordPress blogs and now I can do it with my HTML websites. Another WordPress-like feature it has is template swapping to change the look and feel of my site without losing page content. One bad habit I have when building traditional HTML sites is remembering to maintain the sitemap to inform the search engines of updates. That's not a problem anymore because this new webpage builder automatically creates three different types of sitemaps. Some other features include built-in SEO site analysis, popup creator, site siloing for optimal search engine placement and one of my favorite things, the affiliate link wizard. The list goes on and on. If you're still using FrontPage extensions, perhaps it's time for a website make-over. |
