Re: Web Design

[John Posada <JOHN -dot- POSADA -at- EY -dot- COM>]

Part of my job is to evaluate other department's intranets and make
recommendations on how the pages or sites need to be fixed.  Part of that
process is to protype sites so that the other department can see what the
recommendations would look like if my suggestions where acted on.  For that
reason, I need to be able to assemble a respectable 5-6 page site as quickly as
possible.  For this, I use FrontPage.

Inside of a half hour, I can assemble an openning page (index.html), a page or
two of content, a feed back form, a search page, and an overall template by
using a table to grid the page, so that the owner of the site can drop in
content.

To be honest, I've yet to find a program that can assemble an instant site as
quickly as FP.

I also specifiy that they should use FP because of the "bots", wizards, and
templates.  A department may not have the resources or access to a programmer
that can put together 2-3 cgi scripts or java applets to get some type of
interaction and data collection capability into a site.

The pages that FP creates are, from a code level, pretty clean.  Granted, since
it is a MS product, it will allow you to implement features found only in  IE
and not Netscape, such as putting a background image in the cell of a table or
the activeX capability of preloading into the cache graphics found in other
pages of the site, but it won't choke or crash other browsers...the feature
just won't "happen" .

I've run FP webs on vanilla servers, both UNIX and NT.  Aside from the fact
that the features implemented by FP extensions won't work, they still run fine,
and in fact, some functions within FP can be implemented using either CGI or
Extensions, such as feedback form processing, assuming that you have the server
side of the script installed in a cgi directory somewhere on your server.

I think what you are going to find is those that spent a few years getting to
know html inside and out, and along comes someone with FP, (or some of the
other HTML authoring tools) putting up decent sites right along side of them.
To be honest, maybe because I know something about HTML (not a whole bunch..I'd
place myself at middle-intermediate), I can create a FP page just as complex
and that takes just as long to load as any HTML-craftsman.

John Posada
Ernst & Young
Tactical Applications Group
Lyndhurst, NJ
john -dot- posada -at- ey -dot- com (work)
john -at- tdandw -dot- com (personal)
http://www.ey.com (work)
http://www.tdandw.com (personal)
(201) 842-2699

"My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will never,
never surrender to what is right."
  - Vice President Dan Quayle 11/15/91




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        08/29/97 02:31 PM
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Subject: Re: Web Design

>>Programs like FrontPage are a quick & relatively easy way to create Web
pages without having to program or even know HTML. But FrontPage has
limitations -- like it only runs on FrontPage Server, which is not
compatible with all servers; thus your site will not be accessible to
everyone.

NO! Sites created with FrontPage are accessible to anyone. The problem
is that in order to implement FrontPage's "WebBots" (pre-packaged,
automated client/server CGI interaction programs that can give your site
the power to dynamically process information like forms, databases and
discussion groups), your site must be hosted on a server that has the
FrontPage Server Extensions installed. These are available for free but
some ISPs will not install them due to security concerns (at least
that's the reason my ISP told me).

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