Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Upgrade [OLD VERSION]

Other products by Microsoft

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005AFI3
• Item model number: 392-01188
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 19, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,618 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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  Software > Web Development > Web Page Editors > WYSIWYG

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review
Convergence seems to be the watchword for the Microsoft FrontPage 2002 Web authoring system. Every new edition becomes a bit more like the other components of the Office suite, while also increasingly tying in to related Microsoft products and services. This is vaguely threatening to users who want greater freedom to edit HTML and other code directly or who want to call all the shots on their sites' designs, but for most users the expediency of FrontPage makes these sacrifices worthwhile or even unnoticeable.

With new templates and smart tools ("bots") to help create a wide range of intranet and Internet pages, version 2002 is even simpler and faster to use than its predecessors. Users can draw with PowerPoint tools, drag and drop live content, and create photo galleries with a few mouse clicks. Publishing is incredibly easy. Beginners will love the wizards, and will find Web authoring much easier than expected.

Why do so many people have problems with FrontPage? The main complaint is that the output, which tends to be flabby and difficult to parse, can't be edited by the user and is difficult to run on non-Microsoft servers. This is a problem for those who've gone beyond using wizards and templates to create their pages, but many other users are content with the results. The automatic direction to Microsoft-related services is also somewhat troubling--it would be nice, if unrealistic, for users to have easier access to the wide range of servers and e-commerce providers available.

Still, for Webbies with fairly simple needs and no desire to spend months learning the ins and outs of HTML and XML, FrontPage 2002 is most likely the way to go. --Rob Lightner

Amazon.com Product Description
Microsoft FrontPage 2002 is a Web site creation-and-management solution that gives you the tools you need to create and control professional-quality Web sites. FrontPage version 2002 has been designed so you can create exactly the site you want. You can use new PowerPoint-like drawing tools and automatic web content to make your Web site more exciting and dynamic. If you're familiar with HTML editing, you can also use FrontPage to save time with the new paste options smart tag, a new streamlined user interface, and new optional HTML and XML reformatting. You can also manage your Internet or intranet Web site more effectively by using the new usage-analysis tools, top 10 lists, and enhanced reporting capabilities. And you can use the new technology in the SharePoint Team Services team Web-site solution to create customized team Web sites to store, find, and communicate information.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A necessary upgrade to the second best web design tool., May 24, 2001

By A Customer

I have used FrontPage since it first came out and have a love/hate relation with it. It made design easy but writes bad, incompatible code. FP2000 fixed a lot of this but the user interface was redesigned and is now terrible. FP2002 fixes the things they got wrong in the earlier versions and is now what is should have been already. I will definately upgrade, since the site management capabilities are great and there are new features definitely worth having. But as far as what is best, I give Dreamweaver top ratings. The suite of tools from Macromedia (Dreamweaver, UltraDev, Fireworks, Flash, and Freehand) is superb and can't be beat.

71 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Is FrontPage 2002 an upgrade or downgrade?, October 3, 2001

By	"rtgorman" (Rocky Hill, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This is our third version of Microsoft FrontPage. We started with FrontPage 98, upgraded to FrontPage 2000, and have just moved to FrontPage 2002. Unfortunately, we are not convinced that this product is any better than the last version.

To give you an idea of how much we use FrontPage -- we have been told by both Microsoft engineers and our Web hosting company that our OfficeLinks.com web site is one of the largest that they have ever seen published with FrontPage. It currently exceeds 5,000 pages. However, it has become virtually impossible to update the shared borders that we utilize throughout the root web. It took our web hosting company 1.5hrs, using direct server commands, to recalculate all of our hyperlinks! We don't blame all of this on Microsoft, since we should have used sub-webs more - however, Microsoft may want to prevent (or warn) users not to include more than 100 pages in any web, or sub-web.

Additionally, there are two real problems from our perspective that have appeared in the latest version of FrontPage. (1st) First, it is no longer possible to copy hyperlinks into the "Insert Hyperlink" text box. The right mouse button seems to be disabled. This makes adding hyperlinks directly much more difficult - We now have to add a dummy hyperlink and then go into the HTML code and do a "paste shortcut" - this adds a few extra steps every time we want to add or update hyperlinks.

(2nd) The second real problem, which others have also identified on this board, is the way the underlying HTML code is generated. FrontPage seems to add little things like <span> when you are working in the WYSIWYG Editor to the underlying HTML code. This is so poor that you actually start to get spelling mistakes when you are re-working pages. We now have to check the underlying HTML code on every page, which almost makes the WYSIWYG editor useless.

There has been one real improvement with FrontPage 2002 that we would also like to point out. You now have the ability to publish individual pages directly to your Web site. This is a big improvement, since it doesn't take OfficeLinks 30 minutes to make a change any more. Individual page changes can be made rapidly.

We have so much invested in this program, that we are not ready to switch to another program just yet, but if some of these issues are not addressed before the next full upgrade, we may consider moving to a new platform.

We can't really call the latest version of FrontPage an upgrade, since some of the features and functions have actually gotten worse.

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars FP 2002 can be Trouble on W98se, July 28, 2001

By A Customer

I've used FrontPage for 3 years and have gotten a lot of milage out of it building my website at www.... I also use my computer as a beta tester for state of the art audio/midi composition programs on win98se. The FP2002 upgrade, or more specifically, the little 'helper' MS office programs that it--automatically---installs, have brought my system to levels of performance I've not seen since windows 95's intial release. One "villian" is a program called mdm.exe, which you will find in your task list at every boot. I think it's a speech recognition enabling executable, and you can't get rid of it unless you edit the registry. Why? Because Microsoft believes instant messaging is the killer app of the decade. Sheesh! Not for me! Knock about 2-4% of you system resources into oblivion, forever. It took me a week to stop my hardrives from caching whenever the system was idle for more than a minute. At first , i thought I was being hacked when my hard drives started chattering incessantly whenever I stepped away. The root of that was mdm.exe and other Office XP "optimizers".

Regarding FP itself, there are several nuisances. You lose right click context menus when adding hyperlinks in a hyperlink box. You can still use CNTL V BUT... Opening up a hyperlink dialog will cause FP to scan your entire root directory of your web before you can type it in--about 3-5 seconds if you are on a blazing fast internet connection like I am--on a modem, good luck! This used to be really fast in FP2000!

There is a very unsettling bug that causes your index.html file to disappear from the file pane. When you search for it, FP says it was deleted! It wasn't, just quit the program and relaunch and its back. I hope no one loses their main page due to this. Moral: Don't panic. Just quit, relauch.

Another bug is in the way FP2002 handles shared borders. It presents you with a very confusing dialog asking you want to replace it on all pages. If you answer "no" you cannot save the page you just worked on. If you answer "yes" it will zero out your shared border, even though the one you just asked it to save was full of content. This is an awful, inexcusable bug. The work around is to make several copies of all your shared borders so When, not if, this happen you can easily replace it. Make sure your cursor never enters shared border land when editing a page.

In short, FP 2002 is not finished. It is NOT a polished smooth running application, though it looks very nice on the screen. Microsoft may be using all of us as beta testers. On the postive side there are many cool new features, especially drawing tools and Word Art is better implemented. There is a definite honeymoon period after installing when you are gosh-whiz blown away by the new features. Most of the posts here reflect that, I think. But wait a week of working every day in FP2002 for 8 hrs a day. The intial gush quickly turns into irritation and finally to a questioning of how in the world could they release such an unfinished product. I have to admit I've wondered carefully how Microsoft might actually want to de-stabilize w98se. Yes, it's easier to make a really eye-catching page. But if I could go back, I would not have upgraded to save innumerable headaches fp2002 has caused.