Learn to Build a Website -- FrontPage Gets a New Face

For those of you who wish to learn to build a website using FrontPage 2003, you’ll appreciate its ease of use thanks to its format of Master Pages and Themes. Even if you never take a class in web design, you can get into the nuts and bolts of learning to build websites because this program greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to create great-looking pages.

FrontPage 2003 is a professional web design software product that’s been around for a number of years. It’s similar to Adobe’s Dreamweaver but not as popular among web professionals. Those of you who are just starting out in web site production and need to learn to build a website should not buy Dreamweaver without taking a class in HTML and CSS. With FrontPage, a beginner can reasonably expect to develop sites on the fly with little instruction right out of the box.

With this type of WYSIWYG or “What You See Is What You Get” software, you don’t need to learn HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which is the basic code for building all websites. On FrontPage’s design platform, you only need to click on an icon and type in or paste the text or photo. The program translates what you wrote into HTML in the page source.

The main advantage of FrontPage is that if you are familiar with the Microsoft Office family, you’ll find that it has the same layout and interface so navigation is a no-brainer. That leaves you more time to learn to build a website using its powerful tools.

FrontPage is Getting a New Face

It’s been a leading web design package for many years but its run its course and FrontPage 2003 is being phased out. You might be able to buy a copy online for a few more years from third party software sellers, but Microsoft has already announced they will discontinue support for it soon. They have replaced it with Expression Web.

Expression Web’s software to build websites has an interface quite similar to FrontPage yet behind the scenes the HTML and XHTML code is much, much cleaner. (“Clean code” is more search engine friendly, and it’s faster to hand edit when you need to find a coding error.)

If you are currently using FrontPage and dread to learn to build a website with new software, you can rest easy. With Expression Web, your old site files will open and work fine, and you’ll be able to navigate through the new tools with no problems.

Compatibility Issues

Learning to build your website with Expression Web will also alleviate the problems FrontPage users have been putting up with, specifically those related to the use of FP Extensions. For years, ISP hosts have had to have these extensions installed on their servers for client websites that used FrontPage. Some refused to install them at all.

Not only did the extensions cause issues, FrontPage-created sites had difficulty with cross-browser compatibility. The pages looked great in Internet Explorer (Microsoft’s browser) but rendered poorly -- or not at all -- in other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Flock. (Netscape too, but that browser bit the dust on March 1, 2008. RIP.) It goes without saying that when you are learning to build websites, they must be designed so that the majority of web surfers can view them no matter what browser or screen resolution they use!

Looking Forward: Make the Switch to Expression Web

For novice website owners anxious to learn how to build a website that offered dynamic pages with forums, blogs, shopping carts, etc., FrontPage offered the capability of working with such content management, as long as the pages were set up correctly using its Editable Regions located in the Dynamic Web Templates. With Expression Web, the task to learn to build a website is much easier. It uses a drag-and-drop style management and makes site-wide changes using the same Master Pages system, just like in FrontPage, to readily maintain complex, dynamic websites.

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