Weaving the Web: Myth #1 – You Can’t Use FrontPage

As of late, University web design and web editing issues have caused some confusion. BroncoBytes is a great platform to offer facts, tips and tricks to help the University web community to do its job with a minimum of worry and a maximum of productivity.

Let’s start off addressing Myth #1: “I’ve heard I can’t use Microsoft FrontPage to edit my websites.”

That’s incorrect. Of course you can use FrontPage. In fact, it is one of several tools available to develop web content on campus.

First, some facts. Microsoft no longer makes FrontPage. The successor to FrontPage is called Expression Web. Microsoft decided they weren’t really competing well with Macromedia and Adobe in the professional multimedia software sphere, so they created a brand called Expression under which they could market several multimedia applications. There’s Expression Blend, Expression Design, Expression Studio, and several other applications (see them here).

Microsoft took FrontPage and gussied it up a bit, combining FrontPage’s features with a few bones thrown in from Microsoft’s VisualStudio application, and renamed the package Expression Web. Expression Web is currently at version 2, and for those of you still using FrontPage (and used to the Microsoft Office look and feel) is easy to dive right in to. Microsoft seems to finally have embraced “standards” in the web community with Expression Web 2, making it easy to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and design layouts. This after 11 years of doing confusing things like calling web anchors “bookmarks.”

However, Microsoft left out something very important in Expression Web (and also the older FrontPage series); an SFTP client. This prevents you from using Expression Web to upload and download web pages to the University’s main web server via Expression Web itself. But, all hope is not lost, as several free SFTP clients are available to do the job for you (see the Help Desk’s website for more info). You simply design and edit your pages in Expression Web, save the pages to your hard drive, then upload them to you site using the SFTP client.

So, why have you heard you shouldn’t use FrontPage (or Expression Web)? There’s some confusion between the actual design tool and the legacy FrontPage virtual servers. FrontPage servers were the rage around the University a few years ago. With a FrontPage virtual server, you could upload your content to your website from directly within FrontPage, and you could make use of FrontPage “bots,” which were scripts that easily allowed you to create a web form or throw a quick page counter on your page without any programming experience. Also, you could only upload content to a FrontPage server using FrontPage (or Expression Web)

OIT is moving away from supporting FrontPage virtual servers. We want to support a server platform anyone can use, rather than a platform that only works with Microsoft web editing software. So, if you do decide to use FrontPage or Expression Web, use it knowing you’ll need to upload and download your files with an external utility such as FileZilla or Fugu, and be aware the “bots” in FrontPage or some of the ASP.NET scripts in Expression Web may not work on our web server.

If you like Expression Web 2 enough to want to buy it, contact OIT Business Services (OIT_Business@boisestate.edu) to order the product for your department at a great discount of $26 for a license and $20 for the installation software, or contact the University Bookstore to obtain the software at an academic discount.

Does this mean the OIT Help Desk recommends FrontPage or Expression Web? FrontPage and Expression Web are just a couple of the web editing software packages we know and support. Again, we want you to use what you are comfortable with.

Next month we’ll address using Dreamweaver to edit and publish your web files.
Have any other web topics you want us to discuss? Let us know in the comments!