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Microsoft FrontPage 2003

Microsoft FrontPage 2003

List Price: $199.00
Your Price: $170.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Frontpage 2003: CSS: Go to the Back
Review: Frontpage 2003 authoring for CSS is absolutely abysmal. Only a small amount of formatting is available for text and other items. Many CSS formatting is left out of Frontpage 2003 entirely. TO use CSS on divisions/layers or even on things as simple as line-height for text, one must hand code it. Frontpage only offers the standard line spacing given in their word processor, but offers nothing of the customization that CSS does. Even when hand-coding line-height - it may display right in the preview, but is a jumbled up useless mess in the *design* view. Also left out entirely in FP2003 are CSS margins, such as margin-right for example.

Even table implementation is awkward. One can not even click and drag and edge of a table and resize it. One must click, and enter the pixels - a guess and go method.

I rate this product as an F, because it is still far easier to operate my websites by handcoding with free HTML editors such as HTML-Kit.

Simply stated, if you are interested in CSS, and created modern websites that implement any hint of liquid design methods using CSS, you should research other products by Adobe and Macromedia.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: FrontPage 2003 is not for beginners or professionals
Review: FrontPage 2003 is not intuitive, html code is not web standards compliant, does not have built-in support for advanced server side scripting languages. Other things you will need in order to get the most of your purchase are a book about FrontPage 2003 (no less than 500 pages), Windows 2003 server hosting strongly recommended. Additionally for Professionals: Visual Studio .Net 2003, Windows XP Professional or Windows 2000 Professional. To begin with my father who is a complete novice found it much easier to use Dreamweaver 2004 MX. My father liked Dreamweaver's the ability to easily add rollovers and other effects. He criticized FrontPage 2003 for making it hard to do even the most simple tasks. FrontPage 2003 has the same templates that were in FrontPage 2000 with the same trashy code and if one tries to edit the code FrontPage will undo any corrections one makes. FrontPage 2003 adds Internet Explorer specific code when using features such as auto thumbnail, web components, word art, etc.. Word art may not be compatible with older browsers from Microsoft. FrontPage 2003 does not check for compliance to web standards from w3c.org which allow one to make a website that can be viewed correctly across all browsers. FrontPage 2003 does not have built-in support for advanced server side scripting languages, you have to use Windows Professional in order to test ASP.NET code and IntelliSense is not available for server side scripting languages. You don't believe me this quote is from the Microsoft support website:
Note FrontPage does not currently support server-side scripting, CGI (CGI: Common Gateway Interface. A standard method of extending Web server functionality by executing programs or scripts on a Web server in response to Web browser requests, such as in form processing. Use of CGI can make a Web page more dynamic.), ASP.NET, or Visual Basic .NET.
[...]I wish Microsoft had told me this before. When its time to upgrade I'm going with Macromedia because developing professional websites with Microsoft isn't less expensive.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Not for a large or commercial site? Puh-leeeeze.
Review: Frontpage 2003 is such a major/huge step forward from any Frontpage of the past as to be almost incomparable. Used in concert with ASP or PHP or whatever scripting language, or simply in conjunction with MS Access, FP2003 is more than capable of any size site, huge-commercial, or tiny-personal. FP2003 fixes some of the weird glitchy type stuff from previous versions and includes a broader range of features. The interaction between the actual design view and the HTML code view has become instantly much better. The code that FP produces, notorious for being bloated and crappy, is now very clean & pristine. Included also is a much more complete and adept publishing schema, including full FTP support as well as the usual Frontpage HTTP publishing.

Along with FP2003, I strongly recommend Jim Buyens Inside Out book. It is so very complete and is written for the slightly-beyond-beginner to advanced. Amazon link: http://snurl.com/30lg
Along with this excellent book, head over to Jimco Addins at http://www.jimcoaddins.com for some truly wonderful and useful plug-ins to make much more of the FP experience.

Overall, a truly great piece of progress in the Frontpage chronology.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Perfect for the aspiring website designer on a budget
Review: Frontpage has gotten noses turned up at it by many website developers for years. Frontpage 2003 is sure to make many rethink this Microsoft Product.

I've been using FrontPage since version 3 and this is by far the best version. Even if you have Frontpage 2000 or 2002 (which I uprgraded to prior)you will see the dramatic differences in this version. It is a professional website development tool (finally).

Slap two monitors to your computer and vola...you can see code and your design mode at the same time (or if you have one monitor you can just 'split' between design and code modes.

And if anyone still believes that FrontPage dumps in 'useless code' like it did in versions a long time ago...think again. Not only has then been stopped since version 2000, but now you can 'clean' your code.

It's a great version for those of us who don't want to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on other design programs that FrontPage can do equally as well.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Perfect for the aspiring website designer on a budget
Review: Frontpage has gotten noses turned up at it by many website developers for years. Frontpage 2003 is sure to make many rethink this Microsoft Product.

I've been using FrontPage since version 3 and this is by far the best version. Even if you have Frontpage 2000 or 2002 (which I uprgraded to prior)you will see the dramatic differences in this version. It is a professional website development tool (finally).

Slap two monitors to your computer and vola...you can see code and your design mode at the same time (or if you have one monitor you can just 'split' between design and code modes.

And if anyone still believes that FrontPage dumps in 'useless code' like it did in versions a long time ago...think again. Not only has then been stopped since version 2000, but now you can 'clean' your code.

It's a great version for those of us who don't want to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on other design programs that FrontPage can do equally as well.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good Product, Terrible Licensing
Review: FrontPage is powerful and easy to use. My gripe is that Microsoft's licensing for this software is horrible. They state that I can have the software loaded on 2 computers for my own use. I loaded it on both my home and work computer. Unfortunately, my home computer was damaged so I purchased a new one, only to find out that FrontPage wouldn't activate on it because I had already activated it on 2 machines. Now I'm facing a computer upgrade at work and will be unable to use this software at all.

Again, it's a good web design tool, but I consider it a software rental, not a purchase. I'll move over to Dreamweaver when it's time to upgrade. DO NOT load this software if you plan on upgrading your computer any time soon.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not for a large commercial site!!!
Review: Frontpage proved easy enough to learn. I bought the book Frontpage Inside Out which is a thousand-page bible for its use. The book was well-indexed so I could hop around and master the tasks which I wanted to accomplish. The problem for me was that I was building a graphically-intense commercial site with thousands of photos. My site worked well until I had about 500 products listed, then save times became unbearable. Frontpage also became increasing unstable and, at one point, it crashed and lost 3,000 of my photos. The real problem was that it worked well in the beginning and I continued to go down a blind alley with this software which eventually made it impossible to use. If you intend to make a large commercial site, Frontpage sucks! I also used Microsoft Access in conjunction with this as my data base. Another mistake.... I'm not a developer, just a guy out making a living on the web with a reasonably successful idea. Frontpage left me high and dry at the worst possible moment. If you want to make a site to show birthday photos and anniversary pictures, it would be great. It has no place, however, in the real world of e-commerce unless you're planning to fail from the start. I wish that one of the IT pros I spoke with had told me this from the start. Unfortunately, the thing most missing from this Information Age is reliable information you can count on. As a novice, I wish you luck in not paying some steep tuition to learn about all this. The problem is that geeks seldom communicate well with people, so asking often does no good. If they could communicate they wouldn't be geeks.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great update from the 2000 version!
Review: Here is a list of my favorite improvements in 2003...

1)Previous versions of Frontpage had a lot of annoying bugs. Some people did not even realize that their troubles with Frontpage was not their fault but were actually bugs in the software. This new version fixed the annoying bugs of previous versions.

2)Another huge improvement is the tabbed interface. The tabs are similar to the FireFox browser. They make it easy to go from one file to another quickly.

3)The split screen option. You can view the html and graphical web page at the same time. This is nice if you like to edit the html by hand once in a while.

4)Web page file/folder navigation. You can easily navigate through all of your files and make quick edits in 2003.



I could not give this program 5 stars because there are still a few minor bugs/issues/defects whatever you want to call them. They are so minor though that most Frontpage users will not notice them. Overall though this is a great program for a newbie to a guru.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Microsoft Frontpage 2003
Review: hi ,
I Pradeep realy like your new edition for Microsoft Frontpage 2003

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Frontpage 2003 vs. 2000
Review: I am not a computer idiot. I know my way around Microsoft Publisher, Word, and Excel (that is to say I can get what I want out of them). However, when it came to FrontPage 2000 I found I was a bit out of my league. Not well conversant in HTML or XML (web page languages), I found myself dismayed. MS Publisher has web page creation that I found simple and easy to use, it just lacked all the nifty bells and whistles I really needed to make my site rock. So...the problems I had with FrontPage 2000 seem to have disappeared with the 2003 version. It's much easier to use (not as easy as Publisher), but I have found it to be a great improvement over the 2000 version.

So far, I have only run into one major problem (major for me). I used to be able to insert a drop-down boxes, I find that I am no longer able to do that. It's probably my problem since I haven't purchased a 1,000 page book describing where they have moved it to (the upgrade only comes with a 27 page book that isn't all that helpful to me.

As for being able to place, display, and organize my page...its loads better than the 2000 version.

Now, if only I could figure out how to get it to find my old clip art...;)


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