Using Frontpage to Create Your Web Page for Hosting

A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea

Microsoft Frontpage and Web Hosting

Microsoft FrontPage makes creating a web site for hosting quick and easy. The FrontPage editor utilizes a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to create a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) environment. When you create and edit files, your work appears exactly as it would on a web page. The HTML code that builds the pages is generated by the editor and concealed. You can still edit the HTML code directly through a separate window view.

Advantages to Using Frontpage for Web Hosting

The biggest advantage of using WYSIWYG is that it allows you to visualize how the content will appear. Your layout, font, color and content changes can be viewed as you make them. Not only does it take less time, but errors are more quickly noticed. A simple typing error in your code can affect your Web page dramatically.

FrontPage provides powerful authoring features such as hit counters, forms, discussion groups, full text searches, form handlers and link bars without having to enter any coding. As long as your web hosting has the FrontPage extensions installed on their Web servers your site will function correctly.

What is Frontpage Web Hosting and Why do You Need It?

Once your Web site is complete, you will need a FrontPage web hosting provider to make your site capable of running the features and applications that are unique to FrontPage. This can be done on both Unix and Windows platforms as long as they are FrontPage-enabled.

What are Frontpage Extensions?

Extensions are files stored on Web server that contains the programming to extend the capabilities of the Web pages. When your site is published, the features are processed on the server.

Not all web hosting provides this capability. When you look for web hosting, ask if they have the FrontPage extensions installed and if they have all the versions of FrontPage.

Benefits of Using Frontpage

FrontPage is integrated with other Microsoft Office programs. When you build your web site with FrontPage you can save Word and Excel documents directly on your Web server. You also have the ability to edit Web pages directly on the Web server.

FrontPage extensions can be run on all commonly used Windows and non-Windows hosting platforms including Unix, Linux and Apache. FrontPage 97, 98 and 2000 are compatible with all the 2002 extensions. So if the 2002 extensions are installed you can use any version of FrontPage to create your web site.

Sometimes there situations where you are better off running on a Microsoft server. If you are creating a database in FrontPage, it is important to host your Web site on a Windows platform rather than Unix, Linux or Apache.

You can create a Web site in FrontPage and host it on a server without FrontPage extensions installed. The problem is that your site will not be able to run any of the extension-dependent features. You can automatically disable any features that require server-side processing that are enabled by server extensions.