Rating: 
Summary: Microsoft Frontpage 2002
Review: Microsoft Frontpage 2002 reminds me of Tivo = by the time you learn how to use it, you have no use for it.It will take about a month to learn how to use this. There are so many kinks and little holes you will discover, you won't know what to do at first, but in the end; you will know how to use Frontpage all the way. And then you will wish you hadn't bought it. Frontpage is an awfully expensive piece of software to only allow you do a few things. It hampers you to the very basics like HTML, and then simplifies stupid and non-sequiter stuff such as counters. So what problems does this web-publisher have? I can't complain about many things, it certainly works for sure. But it dumbs down the essentials, the bare necessities, that any elementary web-publisher should have in full detail. The HTML 'inserter' ridden down to the core with bugs. You will be furious beyond your mind when you can't place HTML exactly where you want it because of this little bug that disallows you to put your cursor exactly where you want it. That will lead up to HTML strewn about your website in any darn place. But- it does have an easily accessible HTML modify page. You can easily put it in with the click of a button, provided you know everything about HTML. I understand that the Microsoft Help department underwent a series of earthquakes and explosions and other natural disasters lately. That probably explains why there is almost NO HELP AVAILABLE when you press the help button. Instead you have to ask a question to your little 'help guy' who is animated and blinks at you along with other things. He never fully answers the question, like you would expect him to, and a Help Contents would be so welcome at this point that you wonder why they spent all the time making the little animated question guy. Sooner or later you will realize that this expensive product was not entirely worth the money. Sooner or later you will figure out how to do everything, and you will still be kept in by the preset restraints of Frontpage. When that time comes, you will realize that you should of bought Dreamweaver. If you are creating a little page for just your family or something, by all means get Frontpage. But if your corporation expects a presentable webpage with some sort of graphical design on it, Frontpage will have to be twisted and turned to allow it. So the bottom line is = if this is just for a personal kind of 'fun' website get Frontpage. If you and your multi-million dollar empire of a corporation want to make a very professional looking webpage, get Dreamweaver instead. But- Frontpage does what it does fairly well, which is to allow you to make a pretty cool website about your dog, boat, wife, lover, etc.
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Summary: Not like its hyped up to be...
Review: First of all I'm going to say its very good for novices. BUT BE WARNED: The server extenshions dont work well. I had my entire site relying on them (big mistake) and then to make a long story short I looked at it one day and it had fried. I was so mad. By the way though if your a student (K-12) try and get the education version of Studio MX, its better and costs about fifty dollars more. But if you dont fit the requierments and your on a budget I'd go with FrontPage. (Also if you can afford Dreamweaver too buy them both, they work really good together.)
Rating: 
Summary: AGHHHH!!!!
Review: I used the FP 2000 free trial package to create a simple site and loved so I ordered FP2002 and HATE it. IT doesn't help that I can't find a manual that actually helps. It is truly not for the novice unless you plan to create a VERY simple site with limited "cool stuff" like graphics that aren't rectangles and you don't require the buttons to actually look good. I'd hire a professional to create the site and then learn just enough of FP to update it yourself. It's worth the money to avoid the headaches.
Rating: 
Summary: FrontPage 2002 is a life saver for me.
Review: I've been using FrontPage 2002 for a couple of months now and I love it. I haven't had any problems making my site cross-browser compatible and I have tested in it all the major browsers, including Opera. I like the web component functions, it makes adding things like DHTML effects and changes on demand quite simple. The insert form function makes adding forms for emails and guestooks a breeze. It's also nice to just use one program for designing and uploading my files. The main drawback I can see is locating a host that allows FrontPage extensions, but with some research this can be accomplished and not at a high price for hosting.
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Summary: Only Microsoft can get away with building faults in
Review: I used FrontPage 97 and 98 extensively, gritting my teeth as I went, then took five years off to do real (C++) coding. Recently, when I just needed to throw up a simple 300-page site, I grabbed FP2002, thinking that five years would be enough to get the bugs out. WRONG! If you are a beginner, and don't care that your site will look like every other FP site, as long as it has lots of cute (and far too large) graphics and "professional" effects, then go ahead. If you are a professional, who wants your site to reflect the design you have in mind, then ponder these consistent "features": Try to size a table the way you want, and FP will resize it endlessly, forcing specific cell heights and widths when you don't want them (tip: keep at it, repeating what you want, and finally FP will do what you want). You want to use the "table of contents" feature, that will automatically update when you add new content. Fine, it does that, but try to get the display font to be anything other than "Trebuchet MS" 12-point (which is enormous), and you are in for heartbreak. You have a multi-level site, and want to use the "shared borders" feature: fine, it works, but if you want to use slightly-different navigation schemes for some of the levels, you are out of luck. (Another tip: create a new template for each navigation level. Stick a 100% three-row table in each template, with level-specific navigation bars in the top and bottom rows.) You insert a graphic, then realize that it needs editing. Do not use the FP editing tools, use an outside program (like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro). All very well, but FP caches images, so even if you delete the imported image, import it again, and re-insert it into the page, you will not get the updated image. The only way to get FP to actually display the edited image is to either rename it or completely quit FP and restart it. That particular "feature" was present in FP '97. Bill Gates made his first hundred billion by selling defective software, then selling endless "upgrades" to people who thought the bugs would be dealt with. Smart guy. You want to publish a changed version of the site. Good and well, but FP (without telling you) will take into consideration the files at the publishing destination, and will use them (of course without telling you). The only way to get an accurate upload is to first delete EVERYTHING in the destination directories. If you want FP to upload directly to an "FP extensions enabled" server, and you are in for a crap shoot. It may work, it may not. I've given up, and publish to local directories, then use WS-FTP to actually upload the site. Do I seem like I'm ranting? Good -- I got the message across.
Rating:
Summary: Makes web-designing and more a breeze
Review: I've been designing websites for.....4 years now. I started with notepad. Even though you produce low-quality websites at an alarmingly slow pace, it's a good learning experience. It's how I learned HTML. Needless to say, I've done some "stepping" up since then. I've tried all the greats: Web Weaver, Dreamweaver, and finally FrontPage. I can honestly say that FrontPage is my favorite. Not only does it offer stellar web design, it also allows you to update the changes you've made to the website to the server in one click...and it does it all for you. No more fiddeling with FTP clients and getting them to agree with your HTML application AND web server. FrontPage will do all that for you after entering little information. Even though I'll bet someone with little or even no HTML knowledge could design a good looking website, I'd strongly recommend that those people not spoil themselves and take the time to educate themselves the the language of HTML.
Rating:
Summary: Not fully compatible with other environments
Review: I picked this up for an employee doing an assignment for me. When it was almost completed, we had a need to switch to the Macromedia development environment, but the project had some embedded coding that was Microsoft/Frontpage specific. Also, the developer had trouble with the wizards that run as part of the package overwriting some of her manually-coded procedures, requiring her to enter the proc's repeatedly until she determined the problem. Also, the environment is not as intuitive as I was led to believe.
Rating: 
Summary: More feature creep and locking
Review: While one must admire Microsoft's constant addition of functionality to already-satisfactory programs, this is a bit of an extreme. FP2002 is fairly easy to use, but seems a little buggy in terms of the "finished" page staying as saved. Importing chunks of data from various Office programs is easy enough, but not really any more facile than with other web editors. More serious, for some users, may be incompatibility with other authoring programs. If you just wanted Word or Excel to write docs/spreadsheets and print them at home, great. But if you'd like your web files to be portable to other programs, this one isn't so good - lost of unnecessary code and other incompatibilities. I recommend DreamWeaver for most people; if you stay in this game, you'll eventually wind up there anyway. Start with a better program, save time and money in the not-too-long run, and ensure that your files can be ported to another program and platform.
Rating:
Summary: Right for some; disaster for me
Review: Despite mixed reviews, I bought FP2002 mainly because HoTMeTaL had just become unavailable. I'm a heavy and long-term user of Office products, and am entirely comfortable with them. Purpose of this purchase was to draft look/feel and content of a new web site, which I would hand over to a professional designer for tweaking. Took a very reasonable couple of weeks' effort making what I wanted. Two major issues were unexpected non-ease of importing formatted material from Office, and weird instability in text/graphics positioning: stuff jumps all over the place w/o warning. (I'm running WinXP Home, in case it matters.) Then passed the saved files to a pro running DreamWeaver on Mac. He is completely unable to open many, and others all seem to have a bunch of Java in the HTML code. (Yes, I did turn off all those unneeded options first.) It doesn't seem to be possible to save as simple HTML files with common code. It's going to cost me a great deal of time and money to repeat the whole exercise from scratch. Wish MS hadn't dropped their 30-day free trial, but I can see why. Right for some, no doubt. But if you want compatible code, portable files, or any real idea of what's going on in there (a familiar story with MS?), run away fast.
Rating:
Summary: Save your money! It's a great concept but very buggy!
Review: Sadly, I cannot recommend this product. What a good concept, however! Save your money. If you don't believe me at least try their free 30-day trial before purchasing and make your own decision. I love Word and Excel. They just work. Every time. Consistently. I am sad to say Front Page is VERY buggy. I designed a simple website with it. It is intuitive and very easy to learn. I was excited initially as to what I was making. However, in the end, I spent more time trying to solve and work around the bugs it has then I did building my entire site. Images and boxes (for no reason) refused to stay where I put them, ending in the oddest places on the page. Identical layouts that worked fine on five of my seven pages simply wouldn't on the other two. Several times it was easier to abort a few hours of work and re-do it on a clean page then to attempt to make the existing page work. Things that looked fine when I built it and previewed it were in different positions when the site was published. I attempted to use frames and use several photographs as links to other pages; the pages never would open in a new window, as I indicated in the link preferences, but always in the small window of the frame. Support is non-existent. When I exhausted the help menu that comes with the program, the program pointed me to the Internet, Front Page help site, where a search for [website] publishing troubleshooting, returned a message of no topics on the subject! I feel that I had spent the time learning either html or Dreamweaver, or any of the other programs I would be far better off in the long run. Front Page is a great concept for the casual (hobby) designer like me, but sadly it needs a few more months in the de-bugging department before it is ready for serious use.
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