Best way to develop home page

Thanks, Sasquatch! I did look around a couple of them and I’m sure there are some new things I can learn (one can never have too many resources). I still highly recommend http://www.htmlgoodies.com , though. Have you checked it out? I haven’t come across a website yet that explains in such detail the reason behind why the codes work the way they do and how to manipulate them to get them to do what you want.

This guy is a genius, but he writes so that laypeople can understand him but experts won’t feel talked down to. Besides, he’s got a wicked sense of humor (much like Cecil) that I just love. Example:

If you’re beyond the basics, look through some of the advanced tutorials. I think you’ll be impressed.


Jeg elsker dig, Thomas
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Okay… FrontPage will enable you to create and manage a website. The various extensions allow you to put a few bells and whistles on your site. It will work just fine, provided that you never want to go beyond what FrontPage allows you to do, and never use any other product to modify the site. If you breach these two conditions, you run a risk of all sorts of errors creeping in.

My first experience of the fun that is FrontPage came when I wanted to add a clickable image map to an ASP page. FrontPage has an extension that makes defining clickable polygons a fairly simple task… so, I load my page into the FP editor, create my image map, test the page, and find myself staring at a screenful of VBScript errors. Apparently, FrontPage took exception to the way the ASP code had been written, and rearranged it to suit itself - resulting in all the code being wildly out of order (recordsets being closed before they’d been created, that sort of thing).

That was one incident. Later, I was to run into a client who insisted that our templates (written mostly using DreamWeaver) should be compatible with their FP98 setup… which led to me making a bitter comment over a pint of beer one evening: “My sex life’s improved enormously - FrontPage has screwed me eight different ways in the past two days.”

The feeling i get is that it was designed by someone (or some team) with a very clear idea of The One Right Way to set up a website, and that it is going to “optimize” your pages in accordance with that idea. Which is all very well, if your idea of web design is the same as FP’s. If it isn’t, you’re going to be fighting it all the way.

(I should, perhaps, admit that I’ve worked only with FP97 and 98. The latest version, for all I know, may have none of the faults of either. But you can guess that I’m not in any big hurry to find out).

I’m a homesite guy myself, and like others here do everything in raw HTML. But for what the OP asked for, I suspect FrontPage is exactly what he wants. There really isn’t much value in learning HTML if you just want to whip out a 4 page site.

I would advise against Front Page if all you want is a quick and dirty site. I used it to make a site at my old place of employment and found it to be hugely cumbersome. Granted, I didn’t use it for long, but my impression of FP was that it’s too much for a casual user and not enough for a serious one.

If you just want to bang out a quick but good-looking site, I think you could do worse than Netscape Composer, with an eye towards learning HTML to improve the site later on.