4 Microsoft FrontPage
This chapter provides basic information about FrontPage and is not intended to replace the documentation that comes with your installation of FrontPage. To learn the basics of the FrontPage system, please consult Microsoft’s FrontPage documentation at the following URL:
Microsoft FrontPage is a software package that allows you to easily create and maintain Web sites on your NT server, without the need to learn HTML or use FTP.
The FrontPage system consists of the following two parts:
- The FrontPage Client program runs on your personal computer and must be purchased from a software dealer.
- The FrontPage Server Extensions run on your BLUEHILL.com NT Solution, allowing your FrontPage client to communicate with it. The FrontPage Server Extensions come pre-installed on your BLUEHILL.com NT Solution by request.
For a quick overview of FrontPage’s capabilities, check out the Microsoft FrontPage 98 Multimedia Demo at the following URL:
There is also an excellent online tutorial for FrontPage 2000, which can be viewed at the following URL:
The tutorial consists of three parts:
- Building a New Web site
- Web Page Design in the FrontPage Editor
- Publishing Your FrontPage Web
4.1 Obtaining the FrontPage Client Program
In order to use FrontPage, you must purchase the FrontPage client program from a software distributor. You must then install it on your computer according to the instructions that come with the program. If you have problems doing so, you should consult the FrontPage documentation or contact Microsoft’s Technical Support page at http://www.microsoft.com/Support/ for assistance.
4.2 Publishing Your FrontPage Web
Once you’ve created a local FrontPage Web, it’s very easy to publish it to your Web server. You should first make sure that you are currently connected to the Internet. You then need to open your local Web with FrontPage Explorer. Once opened, you need to select Publish FrontPage Web from the File menu. When the dialog box appears asking for the location to publish the Web to, type your complete domain name in the box and click OK. You’ll then be asked for the username and password for the FrontPage Web. FrontPage will then start to publish the entire Web as your main Web site or Root Web. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection and the size of your website’s content, this may take quite a large amount of time.
If you want to publish a FrontPage Web to a specific subdirectory of your Web server’s /htdocs directory, you should follow the same procedure, except that when you type your domain name as the location, you need to add a slash (/) and then the name of the directory. For example, if your domain name were “domain.com” and you wanted the Web you were about to publish to be accessible through the URL of http://www.domain.com/stuff/, you would need to tell FrontPage to use “domain.com/stuff” as the location to publish the Web to.
4.3 Managing Child Webs
As your site grows in size, you may start to notice performance problems. Breaking up a larger web into subwebs will help dramatically increase performance. Performance is increase because FrontPage no longer has to go through every document in the larger web when content is changed. FrontPage has the ability to break up large webs into many smaller webs. Subwebs offer many advantages and uses. For example, you might set up different subwebs for products, sales and product support since each of these webs contain large amounts of data.
You can create a subweb by converting a folder to a web, by importing a web into a folder and then converting the folder into a web, and by publishing one web to another as a subweb. A subweb initially inherits certain web settings (such as theme information and permissions) from its parent web. Use subwebs to organize your site logically based on your organizations needs.
To create a sub web you must:
- From FrontPage Explorer, choose File, New, FrontPage Web.
You are prompted for the type of Web to create.
- Select Empty Web.
When asked for the title of the Web, change it so that the location is your domain name, followed by a slash (/), followed by the name of the directory where their files reside. Once this is completed, FrontPage creates the new Web.
Each one of your virtual hosts is given their own web in which they can create subwebs.
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