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Microsoft Front Page 2002
A powerful web page creation tool!
So your Internet provider gives you 5 to 20 megabytes of space to create your own Home page on the web.....
What do you do with it?
You are a small to medium business and you want to create your own home page on the Internet, and you don't have hundreds of dollars to pay a web designer to do it for you....
How can you produce a professional web site with all the frills and links you've seen on other pages on the web?
The answer is a $149.00 Program, Microsoft Front Page 2002. Seriously, even the novice who is familiar with word processing can design a killer web page in a couple of hours.
I have tried six or so Web Authoring Products. They ranged from very basic to highly sophisticated. I've used QuickSite., In-Context Web Spider, Web Author by Quarterdeck, Corel's WEB.DESIGNER and Microsoft Publisher, to name a few.
Microsoft Front Page 2002 is an excellent package for the beginner or the most sophisticated web page designer.
As with all products I review, I subject it to my "Acid Test." This consists of running the product right out of the box without so much as a gaze at the documentation. The results were the very web site you are now visiting. I accomplished the building of my site without looking at the documentation at all!
Naturally I had a little experience having used other products to create my web site. Of all the products I've tried, Front Page is a standout.
A major advantage of Microsoft Front Page 2002 is that documents created in Word or Excel can easily be incorporated into the creation process.
I would recommend that the beginner consider the purchase of a third party manual. A good choice would be Que's Using Front Page 2002. For someone who is new to web page publishing it makes the procedure of creating and publishing a web page simple to understand and the program easy to use.
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When you start the program, you will be asked
if you prefer to use a Wizard or Template.
My answer was a definite YES! to using the Wizard. As in all the Microsoft Office Products, Wizards assist you in completing your tasks a lot faster than attempting to create a project from scratch. The Front Page 2002 Wizard will turn out an outstanding page which can be modified in minutes to customize the page to your needs. Choosing a template is also an option. Templates shown on the left include a corporate presence, customer support and a number of other web page formats. |
The cross section of web page types offered in Microsoft Front Page 2002 will satisfy a majority of it's users. For a "Quick Presence," choose a standard Personal Web as your choice. This is a plain pockets no-nonsense site that will get your page on the web in minutes.
I chose the Corporate Presence Web Page because I liked the modern yet powerful appearance the page makes. I altered it to suit my needs and will continue to polish it. In addition to the two I've described you can produce a discussion group page, project Web for project management, and an empty web page for the purist who prefers to build his/her page from the ground up. In fact I recently completed a web site for an owner of an advisory service. I was able to deliver the site in three hours. It includes graphics and quite a few hyperlinks. She was delighted, and my profit was enhanced by reducing the project completion time.
The Wizards will ask you to tell them if you want certain features included. In my Corporate Presence Wizard setup I was asked if I wanted my full address, FAX, Phone, e-mail and other elements of the terrific pages you've seen and used on the web. When you are done with the specifications you get a terrific site that resembles the one that you are visiting now.
The most difficult aspect of creating a web page is linking the various pages together in a meaningful sequence. Microsoft Front Page 2002 makes this an easy chore. I chose to create 6 pages which were divided in to products and services. I changed the layout in minutes and customized the pages to fit my specific needs. Each page is linked to the other pages in a logical fashion. A small icon resembling a chain is the linking tool. When you click on the icon, you get a screen that quickly allows you to associate a hot spot or list item to a page on your site or even to another site on someone else's web page. Once you master the Hyperlink process, the creation of web pages becomes a snap.
You got to this review page by clicking on the small graphic next to the program name or the name of the review itself. This is called Hyperlinking.
You can easily add graphics to the pages you created as I did. I visited the Microsoft Home Page and got the Microsoft Front Page 2002 Logo you see above by copying it from Microsoft's Page. I borrow heavily from web pages I've seen. You have to be careful not to violate anyone's logo or proprietary art. Don't grab the Mickey Mouse image from the Disney pages and use it or you may get a call from their legal department.
This new release has a graphics selection of 25,000 images you can use on your web pages. For a more extensive selection, you can purchase one of several clip art programs which contain 200,000 images or more.
The screen shot you see above is a portion of my actual Front Page 2002 web site. The screen capture illustrates the Hyperlinking process I mentioned above. Note that the Microsoft Products page has a link to my Microsoft Front Page Review. The file group on the left displays the links from my Front Page review to other elements on the site.
The Hyperlinks view will enable you top instantly see if the links are properly connected, click on a specific icon and open the page for viewing.
The toolbar icons in Front Page 2002 will be immediately familiar if you use any Microsoft Office program. With the exception of a half dozen or so icons, you already know what the rest do. The easy to use Microsoft Office standardized interface is a part of Microsoft Front Page 2002.
For business users, forms can be added to help you build a visitor database or accept orders from your customers.
Radio buttons, check boxes, and other useful for tools are included in the forms building capabilities of Microsoft Front Page 2002.
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The view on the left is a section of the Navigation View. The topmost box is the home page or first page of the site. Like an organization chart, other pages you develop are linked in descending order. Home page is linked to Microsoft Products which in turn is linked to Microsoft Office. Finally, Office is |
then linked to each Office tool, Word, Excel, Access, Power Point and Outlook.
If you change or update your web pages often, Microsoft Front Page 2002 is the best choice for ease of update capability. My major complaint with other products is that the updating process is a painful touch and go process. The structure of the other programs requires you to know which graphics elements need to be transferred to the web site along with the pages. If you don't get it right, the updated page will have blank boxes where the graphics are supposed to appear. The page and its graphics are easily changed and replaced on your ISP's server with FrontPage 2002.
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Photo Gallery is a new and exciting feature in Microsoft Front Page
2002. Without using an external graphics program, you can artistically add
photos to your web page in several standard arrangements. Here you see the
montage arrangement.
You can choose any group of photos and the program will arrange them in a montage, horizontal or vertical layout or a slide show. Of course you can add a single picture as always. In addition to the pictures, you can add a title or a caption to the pictures as well. If you are using Microsoft Front Page 2002 in business a montage for example can display your product offerings in an artistic way. You can link each picture to a separate page in your web. |
The slide show arrangement allows you to display a small thumbnail of your photo and click on it to show the photo in it's original size. Try changing the flag by clicking on the thumbnail of the fag you want to see full sized.
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Africa
Another terrific feature of Microsoft Front Page 2002 is the new drawing
capability. The five objects shown below were created in mere seconds by
choosing images from the Auto Shapes drawing tool. The objects are dragged from
the toolbar and sized by the cursor.
The new web content feature allows you to link to any page on the web and insert an element of that page onto your web.
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Imagine being able to include a
map leading your customers to your physical location by linking to Microsoft
Expedia On-Line and using it's wonderful capabilities to create a map with
your specific location created for you in seconds! The map on the left shows you the location of the Washington Monument. Click on the map and you are taken to the Expedia Site to see a larger view or a different perspective. You can zoom into the actual street map in seconds. You can also link to news, weather & sports on the CNN, MSNBC or any other site. The Headlines or Weather will change dynamically matching itself to the time of day you are viewing the site. It takes mere seconds to add excitement to your web page! From a Marquee to a Movie, your website will stand out if it is created in Microsoft's Front Page 2000!
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For the people who can write HTML code, the program will allow you to do so. I am not a programmer and this page was created without a single line of code being generated by yours truly.
If your ISP offers FrontPage Extension capability, the Web Page you created will be transferred to your home page space on their server almost automatically.
For those of you who do no have this capability (call your ISP and ask them if they support FrontPage extensions), you can use any FTP program (many are available as shareware) to easily allow you to publish your home page on your ISP's server.
Microsoft Front Page 2002 retails for $149.00.
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Take the shortcut to learning Front Page 2002 with Que's Special Edition, Using Front Page 2002, Sam's Teach Yourself Microsoft Front Page 2002 or the 10 Minute Guide to Microsoft Front Page 2002 At your favorite bookstore. |
Date Page Last Updated 04/25/07
