Review Of Frontpage 2000

I manage a large MIS staff which maintains several corporate intranets. In addition, I am the webmaster of several sites, and my wife has also created some sites. Due to all of this, what I've always looked for in a tool for web editing is something that lets me and my people do their jobs fast and quickly. That is the primary motivation. You see, all of the web editors will do a good job, in the right hands, of creating good web sites - but many of them require you to learn quite a bit before you can get started.

Microsoft Frontpage 2000 neatly allows me and those that I manage to be productive and to create very nice looking web and intranet sites. Most important of all - we do it fast and the sites work well.

I was able to churn out over 5,000 web pages on one intranet in record time using the older version (Frontpage 98) and now I'm able to put them together even faster with the newer version. Better still, my technical writer and all of my system managers can add to the documentation as needed, and they did not require extensive training.

Oh to be sure Frontpage has some issues. The product has an annoying habit of not allowing me to do what I want with tables and paragraphs - this requires switching to HTML mode sometimes. The themes are a great idea with a horrible implementation - they are ugly, make web sites look like they were done by amateurs and inefficient. And the new version has crashed a couple of times on me.

But these are quibbles as the product overall is excellent. And the integration with the rest of Office is wonderful. Now if I have documents written on Word, Excel or Powerpoint, it is a trivial matter to convert them over to web format - and nice look format at that.