Build Your Own FrontPage 97 Web Sites

by Steve Graves

Title:
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Info:
Price:
Build Your Own FrontPage 97 Web Sites
Steve Graves
The Coriolis Group Books
1-57610-126-6
640 pages (CD-ROM)
US$ 39.99
HTML is the language of the World Wide Web. Documents published on the Web are mostly written in HTML, because your browser can interpret the document and show them to you. But there is a catch. To write HTML documents you need to know this language. You have to learn what elements are required for your documents etc. This makes it all very flexible, but it misses the WYSIWYG power we are all used to through our word processors.

Frontpage 97 is the answer from Microsoft to this problem. In an almost WYSIWYG editor you can make your HTML document and publish easily for the Web. This allows non-technical people to write content without worrying about the underlying HTML coding.

The book Build Your Own Frontpage 97 Web Sites by Steve Grave let's us use Frontpage 97 for creating challenging web sites. The book emphasizes on the creative and design process in building web sites. The book consists of eight different chapters. Most of the chapters cover the building of an complete web site. From your personal home page to interactive corporate web sites. Each chapter (except for chapter 1) is concluded with a tricks and tips section, followed by a FAQ section. These sections contain a lot of useful information. The appendix describes Forms, The FrontPage Editor, The FrontPage Explorer, Publishing and Tables for reference when building web pages. The accompanying CD-ROM contains a lot of useful tools, like a "shopping cart" application, email software and design templates.

Chapter 1 is titled Elements of Design and covers a lot of the does and don'ts in building a web site. It also describes costs, revenue and performance tips. The second chapter describes the building of personal web pages. The reader is made confident with the Frontpage Explorer and Frontpage Editor. You make your own page containing images, background colors and hyper links. In chapter 3 the Corporate presence Web wizard is used in building a corporate web site. Then a couple of changes are made to add for example an corporate logo. The next chapter the corporate web is extended with a customer service support web and a discussion web by using the appropriate wizards. Use of header and footer documents, server configuration variables, navigation, WebBots (FrontPage equivalent to CGI) and much more is covered here. In Chapter 5 Steve Graves explains to us how to create an interactive web site. How to use forms on your pages, how to use the right WebBots for saving results. He describes how to add validation rules to your form elements. WebBots to save results supplied by customers, and much more. There is no way to escape them and chapter 6 is dedicated to them: frames. By using the framed wizard supplied in FrontPage a web site is build that uses frames. With FrontPage 97 Microsoft ships a graphics program named Image Composer. Chapter 7 briefly describes some of the features available in this program. This chapter is very short and only serves the purpose of getting you started on this program. And if it isn't enough, chapter 8 covers the database connectivity build into FrontPage. With a sample project the reader is shown how to use IDC, FrontPage Internet Database Connector, to search a database and to add information to a database.

When you are done reading this book, you know all the ins and outs of FrontPage. There is emphasizes on the creative and design process in building web sites. Because of the clear projects descriptions in the different chapters all the FrontPage features are covered. So if you want to design and build your own web sites and you plan on using Microsoft FrontPage 97 this book will give you the right information to do that, supplies you with ideas and a lot of reference material.

(Hubert Klein Ikkink)


Other Book Reviews...
This webpage © 1999 by webmaster drs. Robert E. Swart (aka Dr.Bob - www.drbob42.com). All Rights Reserved.