Web Publishing with Microsoft FrontPage 97
by Martin S. Matthews

Don’t let the title mislead you. This 700 page book is more than just a simple text on how to use the Microsoft FrontPage to make a simple html document. It is an in-depth guide to unleashing the full potential of Microsoft FrontPage 97, providing all the stuff you need to set you on the path to becoming a professional webmaster.

Once you’re over chapter one (introducing you to what the WWW is and how it came into being what it is now), you can head for the productivity zone; creating high calibre web pages that operate in a multi-computer/multi-browser world. Besides home made examples, Web Publishing with MS FrontPage 97, also analyses real world sites all of whom are winners of the Microsoft Great Web Sites Contest.

Chapters 2 to 11, cover all the topics and facilities available in FrontPage 97 allowing you to use FrontPage with ease and in a most productive manner. Also included here are intermediate topics such as:

• Importing material from other sources (e.g. Excel).
• Single page and web template creation.
• WebBot interaction with Microsoft and FrontPage Personal Web Servers.
• Products that come bundled on the FrontPage CD for example Microsoft Image Composer has an entire chapter dedicated to it.

Chapter 12, introduces the world of HTML. Explanation of the many of the most commonly used tags will allow a webmaster to look at the page source, understand and fiddle it. Explorer and Navigator specific tags are pointed out. The approach used is to offer the source (be it a link, table, form, framed page or embedded music clip) and the result together with a summary of what the tags accomplish. The chapter concludes with how to go about inserting user-defined tags into FrontPage in the best way possible.

Chapters 13 to 16 are those areas that contrast a web master from a person who creates a web page:

Chapter 13: Linking web pages to databases thereby allowing data manipulation/queries from within web pages. A Microsoft Access table (4 database with one to many relations between them) is hooked via ODCB to FrontPage. .IDC files and .HTX HTML output templates are also explained here.

Chapter 14: Security. After a brief discussion explaining broadly that is the meaning of security with respect to the internet, the question this chapter addresses how to go about setting who should be able to administer the web pages, who are the page authors and who is limited to view-only rights? Another interesting, yet often not fully understood, area is that of secure data transmission. This book explains the concept very well and furthers that by explaining how to use SSL with FrontPage.

Chapter 15 deals with how to place logic—in the form of Java, ActiveX (together with Netscape’s ScriptActive), JavaScript and VBScript—in your FrontPage webs. Although it points out the pros and cons of using the different technologies and even gives a few examples, it does not delve into any language.

Chapter 16 is called Setting Up an Intranet Web Site and it does exactly that. Does you company need an intranet? What are the benefits? What hardware and software are needed?

The last chapter of Martin S. Matthews’ book deals with uploading the web site from your local hard disk to your ISP’s server (given the two scenarios that your ISP has FrontPage server extensions or lacks them).