FrontPage 2003

Microsoft FrontPage 2003 is considered a WYSIWYG web page editor (stands for What You See Is What You Get). It was fairly new to me because the web pages i have created in the past were by a site's (like Angelfire) editor, or by writing out the HTML codes myself. I learned the HTML language in high school, and as tedious as it is, I enjoy writing the coding for web pages. But FrontPage makes things easier. (There are also other WYSIWYG editors out there, but I have never used them before).

FrontPage 2003 allows you to create your web page by formatting it like you would, say a Word document. If you wanted to increase the font, or change the font, it basically only requires a click of the mouse. FrontPage works in a similar way. If you want a graphic as your heading, you import the graphic as a picture and you place it where you want to (left justified, center, or right justified). If you want a background color, pattern, or picture you tell FrontPage what you want and you see it. Unlike if you were to type out the codes, you would see a tag such as *BODY BGCOLOR="#000000"* which tells the browser to load the color black as the background color. Now, since standard font color is black, you'll also need a font color tag to change the color of the font. You can see how complicated something like this can get, if you don't know the color codes or miss a tag here or there. FrontPages elimates this hassle and makes it easy for you to select the text that you want to change colors. Another example is say you want to put a table on your page. If you were to write out the codes, you would need your table tag, then inside the table tag you need the table row tag, then for the number of columns you want you need a table data tag for each column within each table row. It would look something like this (but substitute <> for the *):

*TABLE*
*TR*
*TD*First column of first row*/TD*
*TD*Second column of first row*/TD*
*TD*Third column of first row*/TD*
*/TR*
*TR*
*TD*First column of second row*/TD*
*TD*Second column of second row*/TD*
*TD*Third column of second row*/TD*
*/TR*
*/TABLE*

(The * were used because Blogger wanted to read my HTML tags and put them in place... and I wanted to show the coding so I had to improvise.)
In the above example, I would have two rows with three columns each. And if I wanted to add color to those, I would have to have additional tags in each of the tags. So you can see how time consuming writing out HTML can be, and why having a program like Microsoft FrontPage 2003 is a good thing.

FrontPage also offers pre-made buttons that can be used on web pages. This is one feature that comes with the program that allows a novice user to create a professional looking web page without much effort.