FrontPage 2000 is fast and easy to use, which are my primary motivations. In addition, it's easy to learn and teach to people who don't have any desire to be webmasters. They just want to create some nice looking web pages and focus on content.

Now, some cautions. Don't even think about using template feature of any version of FrontPage. This is one of most poorly implemented, idiotic features even implemented by Microsoft. Use templates and you will be immediately branded "amateur", and your site will not be looked at seriously.

Be careful using any of "special" features such a hover buttons, dynamic effects and so on. The implementation in FrontPage is, well, stupid. Also, if you want to use CGI routines, then you cannot use FrontPage's automatic upload feature (it will corrupt your CGI routines and data).

So why use FrontPage at all then? We use it at our office, mostly because we have already purchased entire Microsoft Office suite and FrontPage just happens to come with it all. This makes it a very obvious choice for our environment. FrontPage is not cheap by any means, and it would be difficult to recommend for a home environment. There are other editors which cost less (although they are usually less functional as well). I'll go over these in a future series of articles. I've actually found that old FrontPage Express program that used to come with Internet Explorer is more than adequate for most people.

Oh yes, as far as FrontPage XP (also known as FrontPage 2002) - don't even bother. This newest version is a huge step backward. If all you can get hold of is this new version, then find something else.

-----SIDE BAR----- You can start with one file and if everything goes fine, rename rest of files. -----SIDE BAR-----

To keep things organized, you can create a directory at root level called "includes" to house all of your included files. Now create a HTML document with only your copyright and navigation links. Copy everything that is between BODY tags of this document and paste it in a new file.

Save this file as nav.html or any name you like with extension .htm or .html. You need not save this file with .shtml extension. Now upload this file to your "include" directory which you created for housing SSI Includes.

To include copyright info and navigation links in a HTML document in your SITE ROOT, place following code where you want copyright info to be seen:

Now if you want to include copyright info and navigation links in a HTML document in a folder UNDER your site root, code will change to:

...and so on.

If you want to change or edit your copyright info or navigation links, just edit and upload your nav.html file and change will be reflected in all documents (using "Include code") instantly!

You can also create your website headers/footers using SSI Includes.

There are host of other cool things you can do with SSI. For more info on SSI, you can visit following sites:

http://www.useforesite.com ut_ssi.shtml http://wdvl.com/Authoring/SSI/Intro/index.html http://www.bignosebird.com/ssi.shtml