Save-A-Boat - The Forum for Plastic Classic Rebuilds!

Welcome to the forum. Hope everything's going well.

If you're used to using MS Pub or Word, using Front Page should be pretty intuitive. The basic program navigation is quite similar. The first thing is recommend you do, however, is remove the "views" bar that shows up on the far left of your screen in the program. I found this to be distracting, unnecessary, and wasteful of your screen space. To remove it, go to the "View" menu and click on "Views Bar". This should uncheck this option and remove the views bar.

And I find the best way to use the program is with the view set to "Page"; go to the "View" menu again, and choose "page" from the very top of the menu if it isn't already. This opens a list of your files in a lefthand frame, with the page you're editing (when open) in the main body of the screen.

Probably the best way to learn the ins and outs of FP, such as it is, is to import your current web into the program and play around a bit. This is easy to do:

1. Open Front Page. From the "File" menu, click "new", then "web". This opens a new web. You may save this web under whatever name you like.

2. From the "File" menu, click "Import", then, in the resulting box, click "From Web".

3. Next, click next to "From a World Wide Web Site", and in the space beneath, enter your current web address (http://sailing.gq.nu). Click "Next".

4. Uncheck all the boxes on the next page, and click "Next".

5. Click "finish". The program will now pull all the files of your current website off the server and import them into FP.

Once this is done, you can experiment with the program on your existing web pages. Don't be shy--you can't hurt anything. You don't ever need to publish this web, since the website is, of course, still existing on the server; worst-case, you could always import it again into a new web.

Give this a try and see what you think. Of course, you could also buy one of the "Dummy" books, which I'm sure would help you through the basics. But I recommend you try playing with the stuff yourself, as hands-on is always more effective.

Front Page is decent, but there are other web design programs out there as well. I hear good things about Dreamweaver too--but if you're used to MS Publisher, I think FP will probably be easier to use than you think.

By all means, let me know if you have any specific questions about it and I'll help if I can. FP, like most programs, will do as much or as little for you as you like. There are some annoyances that you will discover along the way, but you can get around just about anything!

Talk to you later,

Tim

I can't offer much in terms of FrontPage help, since I use Dreamweaver, but I would definately second Tim's suggestion to "just get in there and mess around." That's usually the best way to learn new software, for me at least. The problem with most software books is that they are horribly dry and always assume that you know more than you do, or else are so basic that they don't answer the questions that you DO have.

About choosing a book: When I first got into web a couple of years ago I had run out and bought a HTML 4 guide. I knew NOTHING about html at the time, so I just kind of flipped through a couple and ended up buying a big fat book. Which turned out to be next to useless. Covered lots of topics, but everything assumed a certain level of knowlede that I didn't actually have (although nothing was covered thoroughly enough to be of any use to me now, either...).

When I first started working with Dreamweaver, I wanted to buy a book, but when I went out looking, there were literally 40 or 50 titles available, and the HTML book debacle was near in my mind... How to choose?

I ended up not getting anything at the time and just heading home and messing around with the program for a couple of weeks. Then I knew enough to know what to look for in a book, and was able to make a good decision. Specifically I knew I wanted something with: lots of hands on tutorials, discussion of designing for easy site maintenance, and lots of Dreamweaver "theory" (the reasons behind doing things a particular way with the software.).

I highly recommend Dreamweaver if you are looking to develop the skills for really complex site design, and its great for complex site management, but the price tag is pretty substantial, so I wouldnt recommend most people run right out an buy it. And since you are accustomed to Publisher, the switch to FP should be relatively painless once you get into it.

Good luck!

Here's a website that might be of value to FrontPage users:

http://www.outfront.net/

I stumbled across it in a google search for robots.txt, and thought I'd pass it along!

Thanx guys!
I will play around and see what happens.
Sorry took so long to reply. We had a killer ICE STORM! lost power for three days! Now it's snowing:o(. wont this winter ever end?

Jon,

I was wondering if you had lost power after I saw that Rochester had such bad ice. Glad to hear everything's OK!

We've been lucky here and have missed the bulk of the last two storms, getting about 2" of snow last weekend and an inch last night (Monday 4/7).

To those of you with worse conditions--my sincere condolences! Last year my boat had already been uncovered for a week by now.

Barf.

Tim