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Microsoft FrontPage Review for website publication

As we have been saying all along, you may need both a blog and website to fully exploit your content while operating a nano-publishing business. Since we started in 1999 with zero web design experience and HTML knowledge, we embraced Microsoft FrontPage (can be bought separately or combined with Microsoft Office System). Believe it or not, we still do not code in HTML though we know the basics to make minor changes in the code when we need to.



Advantages of Microsoft FrontPage

  1. Almost any one who knows the basics of using a personal computer can actually design a website.
  2. The manual is pretty good and we encourage you to religiously follow the manual as you try to learn the program. It will make your life easy in the long run.
  3. It is also easy to add functionalities on your website and make it search-engine friendly by adding keywords, description, and title by using a popup window.

Disadvantages

  1. You still will need to learn a few technical things to publish the website to your server since depending on what hosting service you pick the commands may be slightly different. (Related article: How to choose a web hosting service?)
  2. While most web hosting companies will install FrontPage server extensions for you, these extensions always seem to give a hard time. They get corrupted and often have to be reinstalled - altogether a frustrating experience.
  3. While publishing the website, you might also get some ridiculous error messages that seem like gibberish to sane people like us. Often times, just rebooting the computer does the trick.
  4. While we initially heard through the grapevine that FrontPage did not support very large websites but MYNIPPON.com has almost 1,000 pages and everything works fine.
  5. FrontPage also seems to generate a lot of HTML code which many techies think is not needed. Apparently too much code slows down the loading of the page.

Recommendation: If you are a total novice to web design (like us) and do not want to learn HTML (like us) but want to have a program that works seamless with your Windows operating system and with other Microsoft programs, then FrontPage is a good choice.