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One of the things that drives Microsoft's competitors crazy is the way the company can use its market clout and its sheer ubiquity to win market share for products that could never have achieved it on their own. Microsoft's FrontPage 2000, probably the most widely used serious Web-site design tool for Windows, is a good example of this.
FrontPage is a perfectly good product, but it's far from best of breed. Although it offers capabilities very similar to those of NetObjects Fusion 5.0 (see BW, 6/26/00, "Smart Sites Built by Nongeeks"), I found it much less intuitive and considerably more difficult to use. But a copy of FrontPage comes bundled with Microsoft Office 2000 Premier. It's also sold as a stand-alone product, and its price of around $90 after a $40 rebate makes it about one-third the cost of Fusion.
FrontPage's role as an Office component is both a weakness and a strength. The screens have that familiar Office look, but creating and managing a Web site is very different from other Office tasks, and the familiarity can breed confusion. For example, the usual icon of a page appears at the left side of the main task bar. In Word this creates a new document and in Excel a new spreadsheet. In FrontPage it creates a new page, all right, but if you're in the midst of creating a whole site and expect the new page to be automatically linked, that won't happen. It's linked to other pages only if you click it while in the site navigation view. On the other hand, FrontPage does share a terrific spell-checker with Office components.
GLITZ OVER SUBSTANCE.
Lots of things in FrontPage just aren't as simple as they might be, especially when compared to Fusion. The latter automatically creates navigation buttons on each page unless you tell it not to. FrontPage requires you to create these navigation aids, and even then, the process of getting them to work properly is far from intuitive.
Fusion automatically opens a properties sheet for whatever object on the page -- text, picture, table, or hyperlink -- is currently selected, and you can easily make changes to the object by altering its properties. To get similar access, FrontPage requires you to right-click on the object and then select "Properties" from a menu. Then, the sheet that opens is too big for convenience and often covers the very object you're trying to modify.
The FrontPage tutorial doesn't help matters. It's much less comprehensive than the Fusion introduction and has a tendency to spend time on glitzy features rather than the fundamentals. For example, an early lesson covers the creation of text that bounces onto the page when it is opened. Now, I could live happily quite a long time without seeing any bouncing text on Web pages. But worse, the effect works only when the resulting page is viewed in Microsoft Internet Explorer. In general, FrontPage makes it far too easy to create pages that do not display properly on Netscape or other non-Microsoft browsers.
FrontPage is a powerful program with lots of tools for creating sophisticated Web content, and its price is certainly attractive. It would be a lot better, however, if more attention had been paid to the little things that make a big difference in ease of use -- and if it were a bit less Microsoft-centric.
Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for Business Week. Watch for his Flash Product Reviews on BW Online.
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EDITED BY BETH BELTON
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