Publishing with FrontPage 2003

I’ve updated my site so that I can publish general pages (non-blog posts) using FrontPage 2003. Looking back, I guess I used to look down on FrontPage users as people who really really couldn’t manage HTML. In early versions, FrontPage used to do horrible things to perfectly good markup adding superfluous tags and generally messing up layouts.

A few weeks ago, I think following some posts mentioning FrontPage by Robert Scoble, I decided to take a look at the latest version that is part of Office System 2003.

Things sure seem different and while you can go in for the bells and whistles controls that add lots of extra files that do goodness knows what to the site, for editing HTML and laying out ASP.NET controls it does a good job. I particularly like the Dynamic Web Templates that allow you to create a template page and specify multiple areas that can be edited for page instances. These templates can include menu controls that automatically populate and update pages derived from them as you add new navigation links.

So last night I sat down and started mapping out the site in FrontPage and I finished it off today incorporating the previous content and deleting the stuff that had become too out of date and that I didn’t have time to keep up. Since I only have a handful of pages, the whole process only took me a few hours including getting to grips with a few FrontPage foibles. Hopefully, it will be a lot easier to manage now.